For Vanessa Ogbonna, the last few days have been “extremely mad”. Crowned the winner of The Traitors Ireland alongside Oyin Adeyemi and Kelley Higgins, the 28 year-old content creator from Waterford has been booked and busy with media appearances.
For those that haven’t seen the show, The Traitors is an intense psychological adventure competition for which a group of strangers are moved into a castle (in the Irish case Slane Castle) to complete a series of challenges as a team. Among the “faithful” contestants hoping to win a cash prize of up to €50,000, “traitors” are lurking, picking off contestants one by one. The faithful players must sniff out the traitors, in order to win the cash or risk losing everything.
I’ve never had so many people tell me their opinion of me, whether that’s good or bad
Across the 12 episodes, the reality show was watched by an average 557,000 people live, and has been streamed on RTÉ Player 3.7 million times. A melting pot of intense fights, powerful friendships and plenty of tears, the show has been a hit with Irish viewers.
While Ogbonna remained a fan favourite throughout the season, noted for her great intuition and strong friendship with fellow winner Adeyemi, she won the hearts of many viewers in the semi-final of the show, when the remaining five players took a rare chance to breathe and told some personal stories over a banquet dinner.
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Ogbonna told her fellow players that she spent about eight years in direct provision, Ireland’s system of accommodating people seeking international protection while they are in the asylum process, after coming to Ireland as a refugee when she was six.
Reflecting on the moment she shared her story, Ogbonna told The Irish Times “it wasn’t even like I was sharing it to the country, I was really just sharing it to the people at the table, in my mind.”
“At that stage, we’d been in front of the cameras for about two weeks, and you almost just become, like, desensitised to them.”
She says her time in direct provision is “just part of my story, that’s pretty much what it was. I shared other things [on the show] as well, but that is just the concept of where my life begins in Ireland, it’s just the start of the story.”
She feels when she shared her experience during filming six months ago, “the state of the country was in a little bit of a different place at the time”.
[ The Traitors is ‘main chat over pints’ - Slane looks to make most of hit RTÉ showOpens in new window ]
Since then, “there’s been so much happening in Ireland from a cultural point of view, and the kind of increase in dialogue around refugees in the country, and I think refugees globally as well, and globalisation and immigration”.
“I think those conversations have definitely skyrocketed in the last couple of months,” she says.
Living in direct provision, “you’re kind of in this massive house with a bunch of different people from different places”, she says. Growing up in the seaside town of Tramore in Co Waterford, she says attending the local primary school, participating in football and athletics gave her and her brother “the opportunity to connect with Irish families, and that was a pivotal part of our childhood”.
She gives particular credit to Tramore AFC, which gave her “foundations, from friendship to cultural to I guess socially as well”. “Most things I’ve learned in life came from the club or on the football pitch”, she says. She was surrounded by people who “were just affirming us, just as children”.
Being on such a popular show and sharing these experiences comes with both positives and negatives. “I’ve never had so many people tell me their opinion of me, whether that’s good or bad”, she says. “There’s a screen between me and everyone else, so even if it’s positive, you’re almost thinking: do you really know me?”
When asked how she deals with negative messages, she says she’s been blocking anyone she has seen leaving hateful comments. “I think the hardest thing has been not being in the comments and trying to give context, because obviously we lived the show and were there fully, and certain things, for the sake of the TV, look better without context.”
She believes the success of the show is down to the diversity of the cast. “I don’t think it would have done as well if it was a lot of influencer-type people”, she says. “We are just real people, and nothing is cooked up, nothing is produced, everybody’s just showing up as themselves.”
“There’s so many recognisable characters that are just purely Ireland,” she says. She gives the example of Paudie, a 68-year-old retired prison officer, who she feels was “almost like a father figure, or a grandad, or somebody in your local town”.
She feels it’s important to emphasise that the three women who won the show are “very different” to one another.
Rather than pushing a single narrative about the women on the show, she hopes people can “allow women the opportunities to become whoever they want to be”.
“In society in general, really unfortunately, there are certain characteristics that are not always welcome with women, and we see that when it comes to women being quite stronger characters or being assertive or just different things that might be accepted when men do it but not really when women do it,” she says.
Advocating for women is something that Ogbonna wants to continue throughout her career, noting that she hopes to “be part of something that empowers women, even like women in general, and then black women, to be specific, as well.”
“I’d love to find an overlap between media and social issues,” she says.
