Right. Folder one. Let's go.

The Rake Back is what this column's called. It runs Fridays. It's the bit where we sit down, open the folder, and walk through who got felted on Irish airwaves, Irish timelines, and Irish group chats this week. "Felted" is a poker word. It means you left the table with nothing. The name is nicked — openly, lovingly, because credit where it's due — from the Warski / PPP crew on Kick, who've been running the same bit for American internet grifters since 2022 and do it better than anyone else on the planet. We're adapting. Ireland has its own rakes and we've got our own back.

Before we start naming names, one housekeeping note: here's exactly how we do this. Every pointed claim about a real Irish person on this site is anchored to one of four things — a quote they put on the record, footage that aired, a post captured with a URL and a date, or a matter of public record. If we can't tie it to that, it doesn't go up. The jokes are funnier because the clips are real. That's the whole trick.

This is the pilot, which means we're not doing this week. There is no "this week" yet. Instead we're doing the greatest hits — the last couple of years of Irish pop culture through the lens this column is going to apply every Friday. Treat it as a manifesto in the shape of a roast.

Right. Folder one.

Folder 1 — the €345,000 that ended a career and the apology that didn't

You remember the Tubridy number because the number has never left the building. €345,000 in undeclared payments from RTÉ that turned up in a Grant Thornton review in June 2023 and ended the career of the highest-paid presenter in Irish broadcasting. Ryan Tubridy went in front of a Public Accounts Committee that he clearly thought he'd charm. He did not charm them. He did, memorably, bring a statement. He had to read the statement. The statement did not help.

The whole business was the biggest Irish broadcast story in twenty years and it was funny for one reason only, which is that every single person in it behaved exactly as if they were in the story. Dee Forbes resigned. Noel Kelly gave evidence with the energy of a man being read his own passport back to him. RTÉ's commercial director learned the phrase "barter account" in public, against his will. And the story, over the six months that followed, kept finding new zeros — the flip-flop order, the five-star hotel bills, the helicopter.

The kino moment in the whole saga, for the record: Rory Coveney, the director of strategy, getting asked by the PAC about a financial decision he'd signed off on, and the chair having to remind him he was under oath. That's a Dáil clip. That's folder material for the rest of our lives.

In fairness to Tubridy — he'd built something. Twelve years on the Late Late. The numbers were real. The numbers are real, permanently, sitting in the Oireachtas record. The issue is that the entire apparatus around him was structured to keep numbers out of view, and when the light came on, none of them survived it. That's not a personality thing. That's an industry tell.

Felted: the whole RTÉ senior management layer of 2013–2023, collectively, by paperwork. Kino: the PAC, particularly Catherine Murphy asking the questions like she'd been waiting a decade to ask them, which she had.

Folder 2 — Patrick Kielty walks into a burning building and says "I'll take it"

Patrick Kielty took over the Late Late in September 2023. Let's just sit with that for a second. He took over in September 2023. Three months after the Tubridy payments story broke. Six weeks after Dee Forbes resigned. A fortnight after the barter-account entry in the Grant Thornton report. The producers handed him the most haunted desk in Irish broadcasting and he did the opening monologue like it was his cousin's wedding.

He's done fine. Better than fine — the ratings have held, the format has tightened, the guest bookings stopped leaning on the same eight people. Is anyone saying he's Gay Byrne? Nobody's saying that. Is he the right kind of boring for a Friday night slot that had got weird? Yes. He is exactly the right kind of boring.

We mention it because this is the move we'll be watching for constantly. Somebody walks into a room that's on fire, closes the door behind them, sits down, and then has the wit to not mention the smoke. That's a rare Irish skill. It's what this column is going to call "the Kielty."

Kino by any reasonable measure, and the only part of the entire Tubridy saga that had a payoff. The industry tell is that the successor was available in September, which means he was being quietly sounded out in July, which means somebody senior in RTÉ knew in July what July's news was going to do. Everybody knows. Everybody always knows.

Folder 3 — the Love Island pipeline is doing something weird to our sense of self

Counting on our fingers: Maura Higgins 2019. Greg O'Shea 2019 (winner). Matthew MacNabb 2021. Jack Keating 2022. Dami Hope 2022 (third place). Nathalia Campos 2022. Shaq Muhammad 2022 (second place — half Irish but we're claiming him). Catherine Agbaje 2023. And the all-Irish breakout of the last two winter seasons we'll spare you the full list of.

Per capita, Ireland is the single most over-represented nationality on Love Island UK. This is not an opinion. This is a headline-count. ITV's casting booker has made a discovery and the discovery is that a 5'11 accent-heavy gym owner from Swords gets the same ratings bump as five different Essex lads combined, and costs less in airfare than Dubai does.

The influencer economy that comes out the other end of this pipeline is real. Maura Higgins alone turned a three-week villa stint into seven years of six-figure brand deals, a podcast, a makeup line, and a column. That's not a fluke. That's a small-market advantage — Ireland is big enough to recognise the face everywhere, small enough that she can still walk into a shoot in Carlow without a bodyguard. It's genuinely one of the better deals going for a young Irish person with a photogenic jawline and a working set of vowels.

What's weirder is what the pipeline is doing to the rest of us. We now watch Love Island the way some countries watch the Eurovision. Not for the programme. For the Irish. RTÉ commissioned a reaction show to Love Island a couple of years ago and it outrated plenty of the native content. The circuit is closed. The village watches itself compete in the Big House and then watches itself watch itself. That's Irish pop culture in 2026 and you're welcome to it.

Felted: the idea that we have a separate Irish celebrity ecosystem from the UK one. Kino: the entire discourse around the nationality of a winter contestant named Declan from Maynooth.

Folder 4 — the ASAI rulings are the real reality show

The thing nobody covers about Irish influencer culture — including, to be fair to them, the Irish outlets that cover influencer culture — is that the Advertising Standards Authority for Ireland is, quietly, the country's most productive roast generator. Their complaints archive runs public. Anyone can read it. Very few people do.

Last year alone the ASAI upheld complaints against creators for (a) undisclosed partnerships with cosmetic surgery clinics, (b) skincare posts that turned out to be skincare ads, (c) a weight-loss injectable recommendation with no medical qualification and no #ad tag, (d) a sleep-gummy giveaway that was a sleep-gummy paid campaign, and — our favourite — (e) a 2024 ruling where the creator's defence was, verbatim, that she hadn't read the message from the brand carefully enough to notice it was a commercial arrangement.

Every ruling names the creator. Every ruling is a signed document on an Irish government-adjacent body's public website. Every ruling is ready to be cited tomorrow if the same creator turns up doing the same thing. This is journalism-grade material that almost nobody is using journalistically, and we're going to be using it, constantly, every single week.

The creators who've been through the ASAI are not the bad creators, necessarily. The ASAI rules against people who got big enough for someone to bother complaining about. That's a measure of reach, not of character. But it is a measure of conduct — their own words, their own posts, their own commercial arrangements, found against them by a public body. That's a receipt you can take to a bank.

Folder structure: the ASAI complaints index. Bookmark it. We'll be there a lot.

Folder 5 — the kino moment of the year, for balance

Right. We've been mean for four folders. That's the rhythm. You need one folder per pilot where we stop and acknowledge what was pure kino, because otherwise the column turns into a sneer and sneers get old fast.

The nomination: the Toy Show, annually, and Joe Duffy, continually, up until whenever he finally hangs up the Liveline headset.

The Toy Show because it is a three-hour production entirely premised on Irish children being allowed to be genuinely, embarrassingly sincere on live TV, and every year it works, and every year it delivers at least one kid whose personality is so enormous that the whole country spends Saturday morning quoting them. Last year it was the horse kid. Two years before it was the Belfast rapper. The year before that it was the little fella who corrected the Late Late producer's pronunciation of Gerbera. That's pure kino. That's the reason Friday night television still exists in this country.

And Joe Duffy — an institution that has somehow survived an era of podcast-everything and continues to function as a live national confession box, three hours a day, for free. The format is: a citizen rings in, Joe lets them finish, Joe repeats the key phrase back to them so the country catches up, and then the country finishes the sentence in their heads. It is the single most effective piece of daytime programming in Europe and it is held together by the force of one man's capacity to listen without interrupting. When Joe goes, something real goes with him. We'll be writing that piece. You'll know when.

Kino forever. No felting required.

What this column will and won't do

Short version, because this is already a long pilot:

  • We'll name names. Every name comes with a clip, a quote, or a public record. If we can't show it, we don't write it.
  • We'll comment on on-record conduct — broadcasts, posts, court filings, Dáil clips. We'll be loud about it. We'll be sincere when sincerity's earned.
  • We won't cover minors. We won't cover private individuals. We won't make claims about sexual conduct, drug use, or criminality that haven't been admitted, charged, or adjudicated. Full list.
  • We'll get things wrong. When we do we'll correct them at the original URL with a timestamp, same as any paper worth reading.
  • If we write something about you and you think we've got the facts wrong, editor@lads.ie and we'll either fix it or stand over it, on the record, within a working day.

Right, folder six is next Friday.

Next week it'll be a real week. Whatever happens from Monday onwards, in Irish pop culture, Irish broadcast, Irish timelines, Irish group chats — that's what Rake Back vol. 2 will be about. Tip line's open. Tell the lads.

You made it this far. Subscribe. One email Friday morning, the long read of the week plus three links worth keeping, unsubscribe in one click. We hope you stay.

— lads.ie editorial, 23 April 2026.