It’s an April morning and the sky at Slane Castle is grey and foreboding, as the River Boyne takes on a similar hue, swirling menacingly in the gloom.
The people of the village are going about their daily business, many nonplussed by the flurry of activity at the stately home, while a gaggle of schoolchildren peer excitedly at the rows of black limousines passing.
They line the grand drive, their number plates emblazoned with Traitors 1, ready to move in seconds when their charges are released. Welcome to The Traitors Ireland, series two, for which the 24 contestants have assembled under the watchful eye of Lady Muck.
While last year was a runaway success for RTÉ and maker Kite TV, for series two, nothing has been left to chance. There’s slightly more money in the production but the prize pot remains the same and this year there is, according to Darren Smith of Kite, a new energy.
‘Traitors is like football – when you put different players in, you get a different game,’ he says, insisting that the skill of producing this show is not to produce but to let things evolve naturally.
With series two starting on RTÉ One this Sunday night, Smith says it was important not to make a carbon copy of last year’s show as they tried to avoid the ‘Paudie factor’.
‘There is always a level of repetition,’ he says, because of the format of the show. ‘But we had over 120 prison guards apply to be on the show this year and I think we can work out why.’
Paudie Moloney, a prison officer from Kilmallock in Co Limerick, became an overnight star more, it’s fair to say, because of his lack of skin in the game rather than the opposite way around.
Smith promises at least one if not two characters will bring the laughter this year.
‘There are two maybe but definitely one character who is as strong in terms of the national love that is going to be for this person and they couldn’t be more different than Paudie and the level of accidental funny,’ he says.
Paudie was a huge hit because, Smith says, the public quickly realised that he didn’t come on to the show to get fame. But it’s fine too to be a fame-chaser – every aspect of life is represented in the 24 contestants.
It’s a gruelling few weeks for all of them and this year’s contestants had two days off to allow them to decompress, which Smith says worked well.
Slane stands resplendent in terms of Traitors scenery, the envy of many other series. After a tour of the conclave and a stint at the round table, we are whisked away to the nearby Coyningham Arms, where someone special will be joining us.
As the coffee is poured, in comes Lady Muck herself, swathed in dramatic silks. Siobhan McSweeney, Lady Muck’s alter-ego, needs a hot drop after the biting cold of the mission she’s just attended.
The seasoned actress insists she’s not a presenter and actually created the character of Lady Muck to help her disconnect from her Traitors charges. This year she’s snootier than ever.
‘I’m not a presenter,’ Siobhan insists. ‘It’s really bizarre that I keep getting these presenting jobs. But the reaction [to the Traitors] has been extraordinary and it’s really lovely to hear how well it’s gone down here.’
Siobhan admits she was scared that she wouldn’t be able to channel Lady Muck in the way she did for series one.
‘It made me more nervous,’ she says of series two. ‘I was worried that I wouldn’t get back into it, that it would take a few episodes but it came back very naturally. Listen, once you are on the grounds of Slane Castle, it kicks in – to the manor born, I think.’
She created the character, a snobby old lady, to separate herself from what she might feel for the contestants. Unlike her role as the host of the Great Pottery Throwdown, Lady Muck, she says, would prefer to slap the contestants more.
‘[She’d like to] shout at them and shake them a little bit, but thankfully for them, I’m not allowed to do that,’ she laughs. ‘I think the Lady Muck persona sort of evolved, it is the sort of persona I have to have to talk to them and not be friendly and not be warm and not have the chats. It’s so not like me, so I felt very rude and very unfriendly.’
Lady Muck and her shadowy helpers on The Traitors
Of course, her iconic role before this was the irascible Sister Michael in Derry Girls.
‘I do wonder sometimes if there’s any sort of crossover between Sister Michael and Lady Muck,’ Siobhan muses. ‘I think they’d have a quiet respect for each other – game recognises game. But I think Sister Michael would definitely not be able to contain her composure as much as Lady Muck. She’d be going in with the back of her hand.’
Heading into series one, Siobhan felt she would definitely have been a Traitor but that was a notion that was quickly dismissed. Even while filming this year, she says she was struck by the devious nature of some.
‘I thought I was a cute hoor,’ she says. ‘Do you know what? I am a lovely innocent. I really am because I clutch my pearls every time something happens.
‘I’m like, oh, I can’t believe they turned on each other like that! How could they?
‘I’m genuinely not allowed to play the game that it is based on – the after-dinner game called Mafia – as every time we play it I have to apologise the next morning for my behaviour.’
She says while Lady Muck despises everyone equally, Siobhan tends to switch sides.
‘I’d oscillate between respect and contempt for how amazing our Faithfuls and Traitors are able to play the game. It’s so hard to not get emotionally involved.
‘If this happened in real life, it’d be so horrible. But they know it’s a game. They go into it willingly and it’s really impressive. I try to see who would be my favourite, then by lunchtime, I hate them, and then by dinner, I will kill for them and do whatever they want,’ she laughs, admitting that she could never pick a winner.
Though the days of Paudie and Andrew are gone, this year the dynamic is different.
‘They’ve cast incredibly well this year, you don’t feel like you’re getting a supermarket brand Diane or something,’ she says. ‘You’re getting a completely different gang with a completely different dynamic and completely different way of working with each other.’
What Siobhan loved about Paudie was the reason the public took him to their hearts.
‘People were responding to him because he is a lovely, decent man, the nation’s granddad,’ she says. ‘Wasn’t that a lovely moment? It’s not that we’re holding somebody up because they behaved appallingly, he was a gentleman all the way through.’
In fact, it’s the people trying to pretend they are someone they’re not who will be first to go, Siobhan feels.
‘I think anybody who comes in with a mask gets found out really, really quickly,’ she says. ‘That’s the thing that is very similar to last year. Anybody coming in with a game plan gets found out.’
Last year when the series made its way across the water, there were certain complaints from our English neighbours about the level of swearing on the show. But Siobhan, ever the wit, has this to say of the criticism: ‘I didn’t give a s**t about it,’ she insists, to gales of laughter from the room. ‘Also, I think that was slightly magnified. There are very practical reasons for why there is cursing in our production, and less cursing in the UK – it’s got to do with watersheds. I don’t think it’s a cultural difference.
‘In fact, there’s quite a famous clip from the UK version where Claudia is frantically trying to get the contestants to stop cursing, so I don’t think we can claim that as our own.’
Outside the cursing, the show was a big success across the water too and this year there will be more locations to show off our fantastic countryside.
‘What’s really nice about this year as well is that we’re getting to use a lot of locations in the area to expand our geographical reach because the thing about Ireland is that you have every kind of location here within such easy distance,’ Siobhan says.
‘We’re doing a lot of the missions now, some of them seem familiar from last year, but there are a lot of new locations as well, all around Meath and this part of the country, which is so beautiful.
‘One of the lovely things about last year was how people responded to how well things looked, how beautiful the castle looked. When I’m back in the UK they ask, “Are you doing this up in Scotland?” and I’m like, “No, we have our own.”’
The Irishness of the series is of great importance. Last year, she sprinkled in her cúpla focail and Siobhan says this year some of the contestants will be bringing their opinions as gaeilge to the round table.
‘My own background in Irish is that my Irish side of the family are gaeilgeoirs,’ says Siobhan, pointing out that the McSweeney name is from the Gaeltacht in Coolea.
‘My granddad was a poet in the Irish language,’ she says, explaining that he was responsible for setting up the first gaelscoil in Muskery. ‘He was very involved in the Irish language revival. So that is a very proud heritage. I, on the other hand, have f**k all Irish because I am a product of our educational system here.
‘What is deeply moving is the response to those cúpla focail,’ she says of how people congratulated her for speaking Irish in series one.
‘I think it’s a real evolution of our guilt and our psychological trauma that we have from our colonial past that we can move on and begin to embrace the language as neutral and a language that is ours without this historical trauma to bring with us. This year we’ve really embraced that and we have contestants who spontaneously bring that to the table every single night.
‘We seem to be reflecting what’s happening in Irish society at the moment in that there is a huge resurgence in the Irish language, which certainly in my 48 years is quite a new thing and it’s beautiful to see.’
While the series is intrinsically Irish, Siobhan believes that we are, as a nation, ‘as snaky as anybody else’.
‘But I do think we have an awful lot that we can bring to this show which again is the sort of Celtic mythology and iconography, our own language, our own stories, our own sense of humour.’
That is, of course, woven into Siobhan’s gorgeous clothes, all from fantastic Irish designers.
‘I like to focus primarily on Irish designers, young designers, up- and-coming designers who I think deserve a little bit of a spotlight on them,’ she says. ‘I like to reuse a lot of stuff – it’s sustainability – so you’ll see a lot of pieces that I wore last year, but styled in a different way.
‘Thirdly, I won’t work with anyone that doesn’t regard my size as a normal size and not an anomaly. That’s not going to change. What has happened is that not only because of the success of last year, but because of the natural impulses of talented youth, we have a wider selection of clothes to choose from this year. Honestly, Anne O’Shea, our stylist, and myself, we’ve pulled it out of the park.’
With a prize pot of €50,000, there are various reasons offered as to why each contestant wants to sit at the round table.
‘We have a little fireside talk at the start,’ says Siobhan of how she and the crew choose the Traitors. ‘I ask them, “What would you do with the money if you won?” It’s always a great insight into the state of the nation.
‘Last year, we had a housing crisis and there were a lot who said deposits for a house and of course we have that a lot this year as well. We have quite a few IVF attempts, we’ve a lot of helping parents pay off the house, things like that. All incredibly noble and no doubt designed to make me go, oh my god. But I do think
like any really good media, really good television, you get an insight into the state of the nation.
And it’s an interesting insight.’
Siobhan wasn’t in Ireland last year when the series aired and only came back for the final.
But she knew Kite had a hit on its hands when her own family were watching. ‘They were really enjoying it, because my brother doesn’t like to watch anything I’m in,’ she says. ‘He finds it a bit weird, because “it’s just like you pretending”. But with this, he really loved it.
‘Our neighbours were watching it – everybody who wouldn’t necessarily watch a sit-down show. I was hearing stories about friends of mine saying that they were sitting down with their kids and using this as vent TV, you know?’
It almost broke her towards the end – it was, she says, one of the hardest things she has ever done but the most fun and the most rewarding.
When we meet, the wolves are circling and filming is heating up, something she is relishing. They have all learned a lot from series one so series two will be even better than before, she insists. The hardest thing is keeping everything to herself.
‘We are all absolutely bananas,’ she says of the crew. ‘We’re all at the end of our tether. We’re all absolutely demented. My dreams are about it. I have no conversation with any of my friends.
‘That’s another reason I’d be so rubbish on the show, I can’t keep a secret but thankfully my friends don’t really listen to me anyway.’
She met with Claudia Winkleman and Alan Cummings – her equivalents on the UK and US series – before the first one aired and they were very supportive. But Siobhan – aka Lady Muck – is ploughing her own, distinctly Irish furrow and there will be new elements in store for series two.
‘It’s always a surprise when I see how dedicated and how much work our contestants put into it,’ she says. ‘It may not be a huge amount of time, but it’s a huge commitment to make to do this.
‘Surprise is, perhaps, the wrong word, but I’m always grateful because this show doesn’t work without them – no matter what I’m wearing.’
The Traitors Ireland series two begins on Sunday on RTÉ One and RTÉ Player at 9.30pm continuing Monday and Tuesday, and is followed by The Traitors Ireland Uncloaked each day
