Soon after we enter Slane Castle we’re led down in to the dungeon. Really, it’s just the basement, but we’re in TV land now, so basement doesn’t cut it. It’s late March, Slane has been redressed as the set of RTÉ’s The Traitors Ireland and this is where contestants selected as “traitors” meet to decide who to “murder”. No blood will be spilt, though there is the unmistakable sound of water dripping.
“Is that leak happening here?” asks Darren Smith, managing director of Kite Entertainment, the production company behind the Irish version of the international television hit. Someone jokingly inquires if the gush is part of the show, sending him into mock-guide mode: “And now, our special-effects department.”
Before The Traitors Ireland needed somewhere to stage the traitors’ nightly conclaves – the show’s host, Siobhán McSweeney, will be dropping in occasionally – no one had been in the Slane “dungeon” for years.
“It was basically locked up for nearly four decades,” says Alex Conyngham, the earl of Mount Charles, the building’s owner. The top part had been used to store kegs for the old Slane nightclub, but the rickety stairs down to the lower chamber were “a health-and-safety challenge”, so it was boarded up.
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Now, with a floor laid down by Kite, this once-hidden layer in what is probably the oldest part of the late-18th-century castle will be opened up to the world.
“I’d say there’s been a bit of skulduggery down there in the past, that’s for sure,” Conyngham says.
When the Kite team discovered the room there was no evidence of skulduggery, but it was occupied by a community of wild spiders, and a specialist had to be hired to rehouse them.
“They’re safely living in the Burren,” Smith says. “It was one of the weirder calls I got, because I didn’t know we were moving spiders, but I got a call to say, ‘It’s okay, the spiders are being moved.’”
Kite has had 173 people on site each day, including the 22-strong cast – the Conyngham family also live on the upper floor – and when extras are needed to assist with the show’s missions, the tally swells as high as 207.
“So it’s massive,” Smith says.
We’re asked to watch our step on the snaking cables as we enter the gallery, where rows of producers sit before banks of screens, among them Mairéad Whelan, the series producer, whom Smith credits as “the real spotter of the show” for Kite. Whelan saw the original Dutch version of the show in 2021, and “fell for it instantly”, he says. Kite optioned the format for the Irish market before the first BBC season aired, in late 2022.
People forget it wasn’t an immediate success in the UK, he says. But younger viewers flocked to it on-demand, and by the time the second season arrived, in January 2024, Kite’s hoped-for Irish version was in development with RTÉ.
Later, when we talk to McSweeney at the Conyngham Arms Hotel, down the road in Slane village, the presenter admits to some trepidation about stepping into shoes filled in the UK by Claudia Winkleman and in the US by Alan Cumming.
“It’s been a huge responsibility. Not only to the show but to people watching. It’s all right to mess up abroad, but you don’t want to mess up at home,” she says.
“I know that Irish audiences are very astute, very literate in every sense. You don’t want to do a half-assed job, really. So, yes, I am nervous. And that’s why you’re going to see my hand shaking as I lift up the 50th cup of tea that I’ve had today.”
McSweeney, who has also hosted The Great Pottery Throw Down for Channel 4, approaches presenting roles as if they’re acting gigs. But while her pottery persona is about being supportive to contestants, her job on The Traitors is “to give them information, sometimes to put the fear of God into them” and then to step back.
So is it harder being mean?
“Every actor will say it’s more fun being a villain.”
On past versions of the show, McSweeney notes, most contestants say they want to be picked as a traitor rather than designated one of the “faithful”, the group tasked with rooting out and “banishing” the traitors in their midst.
“It’s a safe way to be your shadow self, isn’t it? It’s a safe way to be a treacherous, back-stabbing person without consequences, and perhaps with rewards. That’s what makes it fascinating from a psychological perspective.”
She has decided she would be “rubbish” at being a traitor, however. “I have a face that has no filter.”
The cast members are back in their hotel rooms during our set visit, but the crew spend the whole day in the castle or the temporary marquees at the back. Filming hours lengthen if a traitor is banished by the cast at the nightly Round Table and the remaining traitors decide to recruit a new ally.
“We’re working a bit longer then, because we have to get who they recruit back to the castle and interviewed and all that kind of stuff,” Smith says.
We’re shown small booths where story producers sit when they remotely conduct interviews with the cast about the day’s events. It’s important that the cast don’t see any facial reactions that “send them down the wrong road or the right road”, he explains.
This is a game of deception, treachery and traffic management, with the cast blindfolded and required to wear ear defenders at times to avoid off-screen detection of traitors. At stake is a €50,000 prize pot, which will be claimed by one or more people left standing at the end.
We pass through a chillout area dotted with furniture from unrenewed Kite productions, then reach the castle’s entrance hall, which has been reconfigured as the breakfastroom. It’s eye-shielding time. Cast portraits adorn one wall, with red “Xs” slapped across those who have already been eliminated.
“Please look the other way, because you’re going to have spoilers,” Smith says as he shepherds us into the Round Table room. This is Kite’s surreal re-creation of the most important part of the set, where the cast meet to use intuition, guesswork and any tactic they can think of before voting who to banish.
The table will “go into storage for season two”, Smith says optimistically – RTÉ won’t consider a recommission until after the 12-episode show debuts, on Sunday, August 31st.
Soon we’re also banished from the castle, with the flapping traitors’ flag the only visible sign from the front entrance that something out of the ordinary is taking place inside.
A month after Kite’s residency at Slane, I talk to Smith again. It’s “the aftermath of the war”, he says, referring to the intense filming schedule, but he’s on a high.
The Traitors is not about producers making interventions, he stresses; it’s about letting the game “get under the skin” of the cast, who control the outcome, and the Kite team were agog at the “twists and turns” of how they did it.
“And that’s before we get our evil paws on it,” he says, referring to the art of working back from the ending as they edit.
“It’s all there,” he adds, meaning that the cameras missed none of the drama.
Shows like The Traitors Ireland don’t come along every day. It’s a “pinch-yourself commission” for Kite. It’s also “a really interesting prism for viewing a nation’s style of lying”, he says, and ultimately just “really brilliant TV”.
The Traitors Ireland begins on RTÉ One at 9.35pm on Sunday, August 31st, and continues on Monday, September 1st, and Tuesday, September 2nd
