Sign in. It’s quick, free and it’s up to you.
An account is an optional way to support the work we do. Find out more.
And The Winner Is...
The Traitors Ireland crowns its winner (or winners?) after dramatic finale
A dramatic final saw a deadlocked vote, a last-minute twist and one final test of trust as the remaining players battled for the €45,850 prize pot.
Spoiler warning: This article contains spoilers for the final episode of season two of The Traitors Ireland.
THE SECOND SEASON of The Traitors Ireland has come to an end, and it’s another win for the faithfuls.
Against the odds, faithfuls Anna and Diego beat out traitors Carla and Pauric to claim victory at the last moment.
The final prize pot stood at €45,850, meaning each winner will take home €22,925.
At an official screening of the final this evening, this year’s cast members clapped and cheered as 28-year-old postal worker Anna and 40-year-old physician associate Diego turned on Pauric and secured the win for team faithful.
Speaking to media including The Journal this evening, Diego and Anna shared their surprise and delight at winning the game – and revealed they had formed a “secret alliance” as the game drew to an end.
Diego said that he’ll be putting his winnings towards a honeymoon on a tropical island for himself and his husband, Denis, while Anna said that her and her partner will be saving her share for when the couple are ready to start trying for a child.
A traitor’s fate comes down to luck
The end could have gone very differently. Fans of Carla will be devastated that the culmination of her game came down to chance.
Throughout three rounds of voting at the final roundtable, neither Pauric nor Diego would budge from their choice of whom to banish (Pauric wanting to banish Anna, Diego wanting to banish Carla). And so, it went to ‘the chests of chance’, a mechanism we’ve seen play out before on the UK version of the game when successive rounds of voting couldn’t break a tie.
Pauric and Diego, as the two players without votes against them, picked between two chests, one of which contained a dagger granting the power of an additional vote. Diego won the dagger, and so, it was goodbye to Carla – an unfortunate end for her.
Although it was an unfortunate end for Carla, she said this evening that she’d been surprised to make it as far in the game as she did in the first place. “I knew I was never winning,” she said.
A house of cards tumbles down
Carla’s departure left just one traitor, Pauric, still in the game.
Pauric remarked in previous episodes that he had all his game pieces lining up, and for a while, it certainly seemed that way.
If Diego had voted the way Pauric wanted him to and banished Anna, it would have been up to Pauric to choose whether to stick with Carla and vote out Diego to split the money between the two traitors, or to side with Diego and vote out Carla to win all the money for himself.
A few episodes ago, Anna had been a pretty good ally for Pauric, but by the final, her trust in him had eroded, as we saw during that conversation she had with Carla – no doubt helped along by him putting her name down for banishment at the previous roundtable.
Anna mentioned her doubts about Pauric in an interview with producers shown early in the episode, but later seemed to swing back towards being predominantly suspicious of Carla and Diego. We know, of course, how it played out in the end.
If Pauric had stayed close with Anna – if he hadn’t been gunning for her at recent roundtables – could the ending have gone differently for him? All he needed was one of the faithfuls to vote for the other. Instead, he put his faith in Diego, but Diego wasn’t nearly as convinced by Pauric’s faithful act as he’d been letting on.
At the finale screening event this evening, Pauric said he knew he could be in trouble once Pete was banished. He felt Diego had a sense that either he or Pete was a traitor – and, of course, they all found out it wasn’t Pete.
An unexpected alliance
Did Diego just play the best endgame a faithful has ever played? He had just a touch of suspicion on him – never enough to be in real danger of banishment, but enough that he was nowhere near a priority for the traitors’ to murder. Neither of the traitors were gunning for him in the final. Pauric had every reason to believe that Diego trusted him, meaning it was in his interest to keep Diego in the game to the end.
All that stood between Diego and the prize pot in the end wasn’t the traitors, but Anna. The two of them didn’t seem to have much trust in each other, a divide that was driven by Anna’s (correct) suspicion that Diego stole money from the prize pot to buy a shield in a previous challenge, and Diego’s irritation with Anna’s reaction.
But that all changed in the final days – much of it, it turns out, outside of what was shown on screen.
The pair revealed they had “secret conversations” near the end and “formed a secret alliance”.
Diego started to become suspicious of Pauric from the time that Kayleigh was murdered, while Anna was tipped off by Pauric’s intense reaction to her taking €2,000 for herself in the second-last challenge: “It was honestly like I took it out of his own pocket.”
At the end of the day, what really matters isn’t who wins, but the friendships you make along the way. Wait, no, that’s not it – what matters is that Diego and his husband Denis – a faithful who was murdered earlier in the game – are going to get to go on their honeymoon.
There was a lovely moment at the end of the episode when we got to see Diego ring Denis to tell him the good news. “How much have we won?” Denis asked. “We?!” Diego replied.
Denis may be the real winner in all this – he got to go home early to put his feet up and still get his hands on the prize pot.
have your say