Last September, Siobhán McSweeney was filming The Great Pottery Throw Down for Channel 4 in England, getting picked up at 4am to make her call-times, when she started to worry that her brother wasn’t phoning for their usual chats. When she got in touch, Traolach assured her everything was okay. He didn’t feel the need to talk to her, because “I see you every day when I put on the telly,” he said. “That’s all people want to talk about. They only want to talk about Traitors.” From day one the Irish iteration of the hit international reality TV show – where 24 contestants lie and deceive each other for the chance of winning a cash prize – was an enormous hit. It was water-cooler television, enjoyed by people of many ages and backgrounds. It made stars of its contestants – former prison officer Paudie Moloney went on to jive in Dancing with the Stars, and popped up in a TV advert with Joanne McNally. The final had an audience of 732,000 viewers. As host, McSweeney – already famous from her role as Sr Michael in Derry Girls – had a uniquely colourful presence. She was vampy. She was imperious. She could send the atmosphere plummeting in Slane Castle, where the show was filmed, and rescue a tense situation with a knowing smile. Her outfits sparked joy: from the jaunty black boleros and extravagant silk capes to the Victorian-style neck ruffs, sported with matching eyeshadow and a dimpled grin. When Kite Entertainment – the independent company that makes the programme for RTÉ – approached her to present, she initially demurred. “I agreed after saying no three times,” she says in the Cellar Bar of the Merrion Hotel in Dublin. She has flown in from London to speak to The Irish Times ahead of the second series airing later this month. “I said no because frankly I thought RTÉ would f**k it up. So did the nation. I’m not going to be part of a failed British reproduction. I can’t do a s**t version of what Claudia Winkleman [the host for the British version] does. Don’t f**k up the format, and they didn’t, which is down to Kite.”It’s a big, florid, surprisingly candid statement – which is typical over an hour’s conversation with McSweeney. Jovial, thoughtful and theatrical in conversation, she calls things how she sees them. One would imagine she’s a terror for publicists (there’s one from RTÉ’s press office lingering today in the background, as well as her London agent, Kevin Brady). She’s great company. McSweeney has always been this way, as well as being naturally kind and interested in people. We first met as undergrads in UCC in the late 1990s. We were both cast in a play called The Physicists by Swiss playwright Friedrich Dürrenmatt, which ran at The Granary Theatre in Cork. [ ‘A mix of Enya and Countess Markievicz’: Siobhán McSweeney dresses up for The TraitorsOpens in new window ]Neither of us remember much about the play, but I do recall how good McSweeney was in it. At the time, she was studying science. Even back then it seemed inexplicable she wasn’t pursuing acting, or at least an arts degree. Although Cillian Murphy was floating around the campus at the same time, starring in Disco Pigs and performing with The Sons of Mr. Green Genes, she would talk down the idea of acting as a career. It seemed an impossible notion, a dream too fanciful to bear thinking about, particularly if you were a woman.McSweeney easily remembers the standards that existed for women in those days; she – along with a new generation of actors and presenters – is still chasing away the cobwebs of them today. “I shouldn’t be on telly at all, I’m told continuously,” she says. “Because everybody who works on telly should be blond, speak a certain way, have a certain size. Those days are gone now because that was never the truth.”Siobhán McSweeney as Sr Michael in Derry Girls. Photograph: Peter Marley When McSweeney won the role of gruff, slyly wry and puckish Sr Michael in Derry Girls and became a Bafta-award-winning, meme-inspiring star, as beloved on TikTok as on telly, it felt like a triumph. The show was a huge hit for Channel 4 first, then Netflix. “It was a successful comedy about young girls. Name another character that is like Sr Michael. Name one since,” McSweeney says. “It was not only the success of Derry Girls. It was the success of Derry Girls in a patriarchy.”[ Siobhán McSweeney: ‘As an Irish woman who isn’t Angelina Jolie, the big fear is invisibility’Opens in new window ]The series was hailed for how it unpicked tropes about Northern Ireland, but writer Lisa McGee’s quieter victory was to spotlight women in a way that felt new: partly through scale – there were so many female characters foregrounded on screen it felt almost brazen – and partly through making a virtue of the characters’ unique reality. These were teens breezily making their way in Derry in the mid-1990s, pairing homework with the inconvenience of British military checkpoint inspections and bomb squads. Today McSweeney has arrived to our interview dressed, more or less, in the Irish flag. Her colour-block dress with a cape and a high-low hem from the luxury brand Roksanda replicates the Tricolour. “I’m launching my presidential campaign,” she says, laughing. “I saw it on sale. It’s beautiful.” She does a twirl, then leans in to show off the make-up look created by her friend, the make-up artist Nicki Minshull, who McSweeney first met on the set of The Great Pottery Throw Down (which she has hosted since 2021). “Dark green eyeshadow with a wine-red lip,” she confirms. It’s not necessarily a Siobhán McSweeney look. “It’s for Lady Muck.” Who is Lady Muck? That’s the character McSweeney plays when she presents the show. She doesn’t believe in method acting: “That’s such bulls**t,” she says, describing it as an “indulgence” for male actors. “I think Kirsten Dunst said: ‘You never see a woman or mother method acting because they have to go home and feed the children’.” But she wants intricacy. “Even for presenter roles it’s a kind of character acting,” she says. “I realised I needed a character to present anything.” In her vision, “Lady Muck is a dubious aristo who has invited members of the public to come to her castle where she mentally tortures people for her own amusement.” In the new series there will be, she promises, some extraordinary outfits, with Irish designers including Sara O’Neill of Éadach and Oran Aurelio returning to the fold. “Then we found a whole new flock of new and emerging designers who really run with the theme.”Actor and presenter Siobhán McSweeney. Photograph: Evan Doherty The series was filmed in March. Last year, McSweeney says, “my mood board was Countess Markievicz with Agatha Christie in a drawingroom murder. This year it’s more Gráinne Mhaol. So it’s a bit more pirating and highwayman. It’s a camp show. We have castles and wolfhounds. Why not lean into that mythological iconography and symbolism?”McSweeney’s Irish heritage is important to her. She was raised in Aherla in Co Cork. Her grandfather was a poet. Her father was a Gaeilgeoir. Her accent oscillates between strong Cork, a flirtation with London, and a received pronunciation of crisp consonants and BBC-style intonation. It’s not accidental. When she was young, as an asthmatic child who disliked sports and loved books and was sometimes bullied at school, she was sent by her mother to elocution and speech and drama classes. “My mother sent me to elocution classes, not for me to become an actor, under no circumstances, but so my beautiful Co Cork accent would be wiped away. And that I would do my ‘th’s and I would speak like what the British would call a middle-class person. My father was sent to boarding school so that he would learn English, because he would never become anything if he only spoke Irish. We forget the legacy of postcolonialism, and we think that it’s all about drinking Guinness, going to the Aran Islands and learning Irish.”It was a given that she would attend college. “We grew up in the era of free education. If you could read without moving your lips, you were sent to UCC. It was something my mother didn’t get to do. Mam was mainly a housewife and dad was a civil servant who worked in customs and excise. So you’re not going to have that extraordinary opportunity and be, ‘I want to be an artist’. No, you’ll become part of the professional classes. I knew I was an actor, but that I wouldn’t be allowed to be.”When McSweeney applied for drama school in England, it was after a long period of internal struggle, balancing her needs versus her parents’ dreams for her. “I sacrificed my parents’ happiness to give up UCC to go to drama school,” she says. It’s obviously a deep well of sadness for her. “Anybody who’s in the creative industries, you always have an angel and a devil on your shoulder, and the devil quite often is your parents going, ‘Don’t embarrass us’, or whatever is their particular philosophy.” Going against their express wishes hurt McSweeney as well as them. Her mother did not live to see her succeed – she died when McSweeney was 27. “I was stuck in a status of grief for about a decade after my mum died,” she says.Siobhán McSweeney with the Bafta for female performance in a comedy programme in 2023. Photograph: Joe Maher/Getty Images Her father died in 2018. McSweeney and her brother took care of him in his last months of life, even as she was shooting the second series of Derry Girls. Spud, her 2023 short comedy film for the BBC, which she directed, was informed by her experiences, with McSweeney playing the role of a woman in rural Ireland caring for her elderly father. “Invisible women, for me, are unmarried daughters who look after their parents. I want to shine a light on those people.”She mourns their passing, but recognises that their disapproval had limited her. “Once they’re gone, there is a freedom,” she says. She felt more capacity to be bold, to make choices that suited her. And life away from Ireland gave her more options, too. When she moved to London to take up her place at the Central School of Speech and Drama, she sometimes experienced a profound ignorance about Ireland: “I was asked, ‘Do you have supermarkets?’” But she also found great opportunity. “The Brits have given me a much better life over there than I would have had here. I wouldn’t have had half the opportunities if I’d stayed in Ireland.”McSweeney has built up a formidable CV in theatre – she has been centre stage in a slew of plays at The National Theatre in London. She also performed recently alongside her Derry Girls’ co-star Nicola Coughlan in The Playboy of the Western World at the same theatre. “Stage in general is a more rewarding artistic experience,” she says. “It’s a worse experience financially.” On the small screen she has tackled roles in the likeable comedy Extraordinary on Disney+ with Máiréad Tyers, as well as Amandaland, and Nine Bodies in a Mexican Morgue, an Anthony Horowitz drama that aired on the BBC last year. She was also in Holding, the 2022 adaptation of the Graham Norton novel, which was filmed in west Cork. Although she incurred serious injury near Skibbereen, breaking her leg in two places while riding an electric bike three weeks into filming, she looks back on the project itself with fondness. “Apart from nearly having my leg amputated, it was one of the best dramaturgical experiences of my life,” she says. “I was working with Kathy Burke: she’s brilliant.”There are times, flipping through scripts with her agent, when her parents’ concerned words ring in her head. In her early days on screen, she was offered minor roles as “the idiot getting up to mischief, satellite [characters], never the girlfriend, the young wife or the young mother.” Things haven’t necessarily improved as much as you’d think. “It feels now, reading scripts, maybe it’s my age, I’m now the f**king mother, the divorced wife.” She has sometimes struggled to break out of the “cage” the success of Derry Girls put her in. “Even now, I’ll still get a thing and I’ll be like, ‘Are they literally asking me to play a nun?’”When Derry Girls was syndicated through Europe, she didn’t get the financial fillip some fans – used to hearing about the mighty residuals of Friends stars – might have expected. “I think I got forty quid and it was aired all over Europe last year,” she says.Siobhán McSweeney in The Traitors Ireland Although Traitors Ireland has been enormously successful, she doesn’t believe everyone connected to it is getting their just deserts. Did she get a pay rise to return to host the series? “I’m not getting paid enough for it, I will tell you that,” she says. “That’s not Kite’s fault, that’s RTÉ’s fault. Kite Entertainment do this on about two pounds fifty, they’re extraordinary. They are the most extraordinary production company I’ve ever worked for. We do the whole thing in two weeks and because it’s so intense, that’s why people go mad, including the crew. The contestants don’t see the crew. The only point of reference they have with the game is me. People are passing bits of paper, looking at monitors, it’s like The Truman Show.”When it’s airing on RTÉ, she’ll be filming a new series of The Great Pottery Throw Down, “worried about somebody’s flower pot”. She welcomes the distraction. “Presenting is my side hustle and we all need a side hustle,” she says. “It wouldn’t be where my first love is.”McSweeney has often talked about not feeling like she was meant to be a presenter, but she has learned to make a virtue of her differences. The word “bullying” crops up several times over the course of the interview. It’s telling that when McSweeney was originally offered the role of host, she also hesitated because she finds the premise of the game dubious. “I don’t think the show is giving us a good idea of humanity, I really don’t. Being a good liar? I don’t know. Also I was bullied at school, and I get very triggered.”Amid the camp high drama, McSweeney has empathy for the contestants who may struggle, either on the show or afterwards, with the spotlight. Some get accidentally cast as villains; others as heroes; others as weak. Their tears may be entertainment for us, but for them, they are their real, lived experiences, not just a game. McSweeney has long experience of being “a ball that kept bouncing back”. She’s resilient. She’s had to be. Ironically her ambivalence about the nature of the show may be what makes her a perfect host for it.Actor and presenter Siobhán McSweeney. Photograph: Evan Doherty On Instagram, where she has more than 230,000 followers, she campaigns on behalf of causes she believes in, even if it costs her roles (which she believes it does). “The Ireland I grew up in is not the Ireland that is often reflected back at me when it comes to dramas,” she says. “The Ireland I grew up in would not have a Bessborough because my idea of Ireland and my experience of Ireland didn’t have Bessborough. That doesn’t mean that Bessborough isn’t there.”[ Mothers and babies: ‘The day I arrived in Bessborough, I landed in the bowels of hell’Opens in new window ]Recently McSweeney sent a letter to Cork City Council, critiquing their decision to greenlight a 140-apartment housing development on the site of the mother and baby home that operated from 1922 to 1998. “Bessborough is being exploited and desecrated,” she says. “They [Cork City Council] are the real traitors.”She delivers that line with anger, but also a lilt in tone. There are moments when McSweeney sounds like an opinion column read out loud (parts of which you couldn’t print for legal reasons). She’s not interested in being bland or conformist. She’s a middle-aged woman now – 48 – and she’s not going to let the stereotype of “the invisible woman” stop her, similar to “Gillian Anderson, all these extraordinary women who are at the height of their powers, who are talking and living openly and visibly as women of that age.” She grins. “Would you like to see my HRT patch?”[ ‘Act disgracefully, if necessary’: Advice for all ages, from Siobhán McSweeney, John Boyne, Tony Cantwell and moreOpens in new window ]After the interview, I text her to clarify a few lines and ask a couple more questions. How happy is she now, I wonder, given there has been so much pain and sadness in her past? She replies with two voice notes. “I’m very happy with the life I have now. Incredibly grateful,” she says. “I get to do what I always wanted to do.”She has recently bought her own two-bedroom home in London, and she couldn’t be more excited about it.“Aisling Bea has a little plaque on her wall in her house that says, ‘This is the house that laughs built’. You read it and your heart swells. The idea that she can buy property out of telling jokes, and I can buy property out of running around in a funny costume: it lifts my heart. We’re how many generations away from not even being allowed to own property regardless of what we did. And now I can own property because of silly costumes I wear, and voices. “Isn’t that cool?”Traitors Ireland returns on August 29th to RTÉ One television