Episode 3

Jimmy Byrne comes home from London and is dragged into the back of a van. Nidge, Darren and Tommy ambush him on his way from the pub and interrogate him about the killing of Darren's brother. Jimmy insists he did not do it. Darren believes him and lets him go, and Nidge and Tommy are not pleased.

Darren's decision is overruled anyway. Hughie proposes to John Boy that he will kill Jimmy himself and calls in a favour from a man named Martin, and the two of them shoot Jimmy in front of his wife and child. It is the series' first killing of a man in front of his family, and the episode treats it as an atrocity rather than a hit: most of the violence happens off screen, and the audience is left to imagine it.

A heavy night of drugs follows. Hughie surfaces to find that Elmo, Nidge, Tommy and Darren have been taken in for questioning and that John Boy has been arrested on his return from Amsterdam. The Gardaí round up the usual suspects and release them quickly, but the press have got hold of material linking John Boy to the murder. A newspaper presents Hughie as a loose cannon and a man John Boy will want dead, and he becomes paranoid.

He goes back to Martin's caravan and kills him in a frenzy, convinced the man has talked. Then he admits to John Boy, who is his half-brother, that he shot Robbie, and that he did it over the 300 euro he was owed. That is the reversal the whole series has been holding back. The man who killed the character the audience met in the first episode is the boss's own brother, and the reason is a trivial debt.

The same hour has Stumpy's jealousy of Darren and Rosie reach its limit. He beats Rosie and puts her in hospital, and the Gardaí who come to arrest him find her on her own. Stumpy asks John Boy for help and is given somewhere to hide. Darren telephones John Boy after hearing of Jimmy's death, points out that it was Hughie who first blamed him for Robbie, and suggests what that means. The episode closes on a clean division inside the gang: John Boy, Hughie, Elmo and Stumpy on one side, Darren, Nidge and Tommy on the other.

The confession is what the episode is for. Delivering the killer as the boss's half-brother, for a debt of 300 euro, in a single scene, after two episodes of pointing the audience elsewhere, is the show's economic argument stated plainly: these killings turn on money and status rather than feuds.

The weakness was noted by the same reviewer who admired it. The Irish Post found the violence against Rosie a break in a character established up to that point as something else, and called it a cheap way to settle the love triangle. It also found the script bereft of comedy, which the previous episode had leaned on. This is nonetheless the episode in which Nidge stops being a joke, and the one that hands the show its central figure.