Just when it seemed The Traitors Ireland had run out of quotable moments, instant cult hero Paudie Moloney dropped a zinger for the ages on Monday night’s broadcast. “I’m not a f***ing hugger,” the 68-year-old retired prison officer told fellow traitor Nick O’Loughlin, after the conspirators were tasked with laying a platonic cuddle on one of the faithful with whom they had been corralled at Slane Castle.
The following day, with Paudie’s fateful words still echoing around cyberspace, his son Andrew Moloney has his own take on hug-gate. “He was being pure cute. He knew he did not want to have to do that. He knew what he was doing putting O’Loughlin on the spot doing that. The man has hugged me. The man can hug. That was a clever away around not having to do it,” says Andrew.
Andrew was also a contestant on The Traitors - though he and his father kept their family ties a secret from the other 22 contestants. Neither was aware that the other had applied for the show. Upon discovering that they were plotting with – and potentially against – a blood relative, each decided to stay schtum.
“When I first saw him, I suppose I was thinking, right, I have someone in here I can trust that’s an ally,” says Andrew. “You’re thinking, right, I don’t know if he wants people to know about the relationship… I didn’t go up to him because I didn’t want to give away an advantage that we had in the game. It did affect my gameplay. I always call him daddy when I talk to him. I had to straight away just shut that off and call him Paudie.”
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Andrew was eliminated over the weekend, a day after his father had recruited him as a traitor. Speaking to the media alongside fellow contestants Mark White and Patrick Hughes, he talks with great emotion about his time on the set of The Traitors, which has become a huge water-cooler hit for RTÉ, with over 600,000 people tuning in for launch night alone.
Three weeks into the series, the pressure on the contestants to unmask the traitors in their midst is intense, says Hughes, a restaurateur and former casino manager from Westport.
“It’s so intense,” he says. “Obviously it culminates at the round table. I believe the game is won and lost at the round table. You are on the offence and defence at the same time, figuratively fighting for your life. But you need to be sharp. The room is freezing. You add that into the stress. You put a group of people together who are feeling the same way, it raises the tension in the room. It was by far the most stressful thing I’ve done in my life - and it was brilliant.”
As the show heads into its final week under the withering gaze of host Siobhán McSweeney, many viewers are astonished that nobody has identified Paudie as a traitor. He has not gone out of his way to strike up alliances with any of the faithful, and often comes across as on edge. Yet, onwards he coasts.
“He’s a very relatable person to a lot of people in Ireland,” says IT analyst White, who was “murdered” off-screen by Paudie and O’Loughlin. “Anything he does, someone goes, ‘Oh my father is the very same, oh my granddad is the very same’. He’s a very relatable person to a lot of people in Ireland.”
Patrick nods his agreement. “In his background as a prison officer, he lived 30 years in a chaotic environment like this. Instantly, I thought he would be brilliant in this environment. Looking at him through the lens of the episodes, you can see he is sitting back and saying nothing, hiding in plain sight.”
The Traitors Ireland continues tonight on RTÉ One at 9.35pm
