Ireland v Hungary, Traitors Ireland and The Late Late Toy Show all made the top 10. Alamy, RTÉ Alamy, RTÉ

LIVE TV RATINGS for 2025 are in – and The Traitors Ireland has smashed its way into the top 10, overtaking some of the biggest sports events of last year.

For the past two years, the top 10 TV programmes watched on traditional TV in Ireland (as opposed to streaming) have been the Late Late – led by the Toy Show – and major matches.

Sport remained the biggest draw for live TV audiences last year, accounting for half of the top 50 programmes, led by the Cork v Tipperary All-Ireland Senior Hurling Championship Final for which 995,000 people tuned into RTÉ 2 – the second most-watched show on traditional television last year.

Ireland v France in the Six Nations ranked third.

The Toy Show retained its number one spot in 2025 with an audience of over 1.5 million tuning into RTÉ One.

The most watched episode of The Traitors Ireland was seventh on the list with an audience of 818,000.

That’s just ahead of the audience of 804,000 who tuned in for the Ireland v Hungary World Cup qualifier on RTÉ 2 at which Troy Parrott scored his famous winning goal (although thousands more also watched the latter on the RTÉ Player, or tuned in for the final minutes of the match on terrestrial).

Traitors Ireland turned in a “really strong performance for an entertainment show”, said Jill McGrath of Television Audience Measurement (TAM) Ireland, which compiled the figures with research agency Nielsen.

Also on the entertainment front, Room to Improve, I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here! and Dancing with the Stars also made it into the top 20. However, the best performing episodes of all three last year had lower audience numbers than their 2024 iterations.

The figures are extrapolated from metering of the TV sets of a nationally representative sample of 1,100 households.

Here’s the top 10 for 2025 in full: