We live in an age when being judgmental is viewed as a sin. In fact, we’ve even come up with a snappy word for it - ‘judgy’.

It’s a wholly negative insult aimed at anyone who jumps to a swift conclusion based on their own in-built prejudices.

In modern Ireland, we pride ourselves on not being judgy - at least in public.

But it is one of the reasons why The Traitors Ireland makes for such compelling TV: a group of strangers are thrown together and forced to be judgmental on a daily basis, and the results can be very surprising, and highly entertaining.

The RTÉ show thrives on constant tension. A handful of the 23 contestants are selected as secret Traitors whose task is to bump off the others, the Faithfuls. The latter group must try to spot a Traitor and banish them.

But how do you tell who belongs to your tribe, when you don’t know who is telling the truth?

The contestants in the show are often left grasping at straws, especially in early episodes when they are still forming alliances and sussing out their suspicions. And they are frequently led astray by both Traitors and Faithful.

One of the fascinating aspects of the latest series has been how much the focus has been on people’s jobs.

It seems your occupation is the one area where people feel it is safe to make judgment calls.

Quick - often lazy - assumptions used to be made about gender, sexuality, appearance, where a person was from, the way they spoke, and the way they dressed.

None of that is deemed correct in polite society, so, in The Traitors Ireland, you get the sense that what a person does for a living is the last bastion of judgmentalism.

Which is odd really. Because a person’s job often doesn’t tell us much about their personality at all!

Notwithstanding that, contestants in this........

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