LAST UPDATE | 1 Sep

Consider yourself warned: This article contains spoilers for the first episode of The Traitors (Ireland), which aired on RTÉ One on Sunday evening.

SLANE CASTLE HAS been home to many an event over the years, but none so imbued with treachery as the game that has darkened its doors this summer.

RTÉ has brought the immensely popular TV competition show The Traitors to Ireland. It’s a format that started in the Netherlands in 2021 and has since been adapted in more than 20 countries around the world.

Irish viewers will have been most familiar with the BBC’s version in the UK, which has aired three seasons to date and made for very compelling television. It picked up accolades at the Baftas and the UK’s National Television Awards, but more importantly, it hooked in an audience and got everyone talking about each twist and turn.

With a high bar already set, can the Irish version live up to expectations?

A dangerous game

The Traitors format brings together 24 contestants, among whom, a select few are secretly appointed as traitors. The traitors have covert nightly meetings throughout the duration of the game and select one of the other contestants – known as the faithfuls – to murder.

During the daytime, the faithfuls must try to deduce which players are traitors. An evening ritual known as the roundtable gives players the chance to vote for a player to ‘banish’ – the faithfuls are trying to eliminate a traitor, whilst the traitors must hide their identities and blend in among the faithfuls.

All the while, the players are set daily challenges – activities that involve a physical and/or mental task with an element of teamwork thrown in – to try to build up a prize pot to a maximum total of €50,000. At the end of the game, if the remaining faithfuls have successfully weeded out the traitors, they will split the prize pot between them – but if any traitor(s) remain, they will steal the full prize money for themselves.

Siobhán McSweeney, host of The Traitors Ireland

As the episode opens, the 24 players for the inaugural Irish season, yet to find out whether they are a traitor or a faithful, are chauffeured to Slane Castle where mischievous host Siobhán McSweeney is waiting for them, flanked by four Irish wolfhounds. You’d miss the flourish of the steam train that traditionally brings the UK players to their castlegrounds in Scotland, but look, we’ll let them away with it.

The players greet each other, some more nervous than others, and through their interactions with each other and inserted interview clips, we start to get a sense of the cast of characters we’re dealing with. There’s a fair few ‘solid pension’ jobs represented – we have a garda, a firefighter, a civil servant, a teacher, a retired prison officer. The garda from Tipperary is pretending to be a courier; he doesn’t want to be pinned as the ‘Sherlock Holmes’ of the group, choosing to keep his job a secret instead (a tactic that has been tried and pulled off with varying levels of success by players in the UK’s version).

A twist is thrown in that leaves contestants quickly starting to form impressions of each other, and for two players, the game is over before it’s even begun; they’re sent home packing without even getting a chance to step inside the castle.

The first DELICIOUS twist of the series 😈 #TraitorsIrl pic.twitter.com/12QU68601o

— RTÉ One (@RTEOne) August 31, 2025

“It drove home for me and for everyone else: A flip of a coin and you’re gone,” one player reflects. With that, the games begin.

A taste of what’s to come

McSweeney secretly selects her traitors (some of whom have better poker faces than others) and nerves start to rise as players eye each other up with more caution than before.

They’re sent out to complete a challenge that involves finding barrels in a river, each worth different amounts of money, and rolling them uphill back to a starting point to add money to the prize pot.

There’s a period of absolute shambles where some of the players seem to think they’re nearly out of time and start telling others to abandon the remaining barrels to focus on returning to the starting point (where they all need to be before time runs out in order to bank the money they’ve retrieved), but it turns out they actually had more time left than they thought, and the mistake has cost them precious minutes.

A mess-up somewhat similar to this happened in one of the UK seasons once. It’s the kind of thing that can raise suspicions against a player – were they deliberately trying to put others off? At a later point in a season, a stumble like this could be curtains for a contestant, but at this early stage, it seems to have been passed over without too much attention (for now – we’ll see what happens at the first roundtable when accusations start to fly).

An international format comes to Ireland

So, how does it compare to the BBC show that lots of Irish viewers have already seen?

First and foremost, Slane Castle is every bit as good a playing ground as Scotland’s Ardross Castle, the home of the UK game. The prize pot, however, is not quite as captivating, with its €50,000 maximum threshold looking a little pale in comparison to the BBC’s £100,000 (around €115,000), especially given it could end up being split between multiple people.

McSweeney hits all the right notes in her capacity as host. The character she’s built for it feels more akin to Alan Cumming’s for the US version than Claudia Winkleman’s for the UK’s; more of a playfully devious figure like Cumming than the macabre air taken on by Winkleman; and it works well for an Irish audience. 

There is something to be said for being able to watch a show made in Ireland for an Irish audience instead of having to rely on consuming content created abroad. McSweeney throws in cúpla focail – a “lean ar aghaidh” when the players are setting off on the challenge, a “bí curamach” when one trips while rolling a barrel.

And there’s an added level of understanding of the players or being able to relate to someone on your screen when their home town is Cork or Dublin or Donegal, as opposed to London or Newcastle or Cardiff, as well as the bit of excitement in knowing that the players probably aren’t that many degrees of separation away from yourself, as outlined by arts journalist Aoife Barry in the latest episode of The Journal’s The Explainer podcast. 

A moment that feels especially on brand for the current moment in Irish society is when McSweeney asks the players what they would do with the prize money. The most frequent answer we hear? Put down a house deposit, put down a house deposit, put down a house deposit. As Faye, a 27-year-old event coordinator from Dublin, says: “Everyone needs a house.” Getting a roof of your own over your head is not the most glamorous dream, but it’s certainly one that will resonate with viewers at a time when house-hunting feels as dangerous and nightmarish an endeavour as The Traitors itself.

And we’re off! 24 players, one epic game of trust and betrayal. Who will survive to take the prize 👀#TraitorsIRL pic.twitter.com/aZZYHHDxfk

— RTÉ One (@RTEOne) August 31, 2025

One noticeable difference is the absence so far of ‘shields’, a mechanism introduced in the BBC’s second season. During challenges, players in the UK’s version often have the opportunity to try to win a shield, which protects them from being murdered by the traitors that evening.

The shields open up a whole new spectrum of gameplay strategies and ensuing drama; if a faithful works too hard to win a shield at the expense of helping their teammates with the main challenge, it could put a target on their back at the roundtable. If a traitor secures a shield for themself, it could help them pull off their ‘I’m a faithful’ performance, or backfire by making them look suspicious. If the traitors accidentally try to murder someone with a shield… I could go on, but in essence, there’s a whole range of gameplay opportunities opened up by the introduction of shields that heighten the tension for the audience.

Perhaps RTÉ decided to dispense with the concept of the shields for the first season and stick to the more basic version of the game as it and the audience settle into the show and learn the rules, or maybe the shields will make an appearance in later episodes. It would be a pity to miss out on the divilment they stir up.

All in all, it is about what you would expect for the first episode of a season of The Traitors: some scene setting, some laying down the ground rules, alliances and suspicions beginning to form, a couple of twists thrown in, and in the midst of it all, a trio of traitors with murderous hearts eager to sign away the lives of their fellow players with a flick of their pen.

At the outset of the game, McSweeney promised the players debauchery; let’s hope there’s plenty of that to come over the next four weeks.

If you watched the episode, what did you think of it?