Episode 1

Series three opens on three men standing over something just out of shot, a man gurgling and rasping off screen, and then runs back a few days to explain the tableau. The audience is left to guess who is dying and who is responsible, and the answer turns out to be the dissident republican boss Christopher "Git" Loughman, killed by a gang that had only meant to keep him quiet.

The trigger is small. Ado owes money to Dano Loughman, the hot-headed son of Git, and Dano drags him into the stairwell of a flats complex and shoots him in the knee. Git is displeased rather than vengeful, because he wants to keep the peace with Nidge: he intends to use the gang's existing smuggling channels to import arms and explosives. Nidge, who has run the gang since John Boy's death, plays the diplomat and tries to smooth the matter over, blind to the cracks already showing in his own crew.

Darren will not let it lie. Against Nidge's judgement he throws a pipe bomb at Git's car and succeeds only in blowing up the vehicle. Nidge denies all knowledge and, to calm things, persuades Git to join him and the gang for the St Patrick's Day celebrations. The night is a long, drink- and drug-fuelled crawl in which Git believes he is the one doing the playing. He is like a little Jack Russell, all he wants you to do is pat him on the head, he sneers to Dano, while Nidge may be playing him.

It ends at Nidge's club. Tommy catches a drunken Git trying to rape Siobhán, Tommy's own partner, in the backyard, and beats him badly. When Darren intervenes he finishes Git by bringing the edge of a beer keg down on his head, telling an appalled Nidge, I was just putting him out of his misery, that's all. The three of them load the body into Fran's van, drive it to a building site and bury it in a hole dug with a digger. The episode closes on the same men eating an all-day breakfast in a fast-food restaurant as Gene Pitney's Twenty Four Hours from Tulsa plays over the scene.

The episode gives the audience a murder it has watched a character earn all hour, and the burial-and-breakfast ending is the clearest statement of the show's unglamorous economics. The Irish Times called it a beautifully filmed triumph, tightly written by Stuart Carolan, and the Irish Independent's Herald column gave it five stars and called it a brilliantly audacious and risky way to open the new series.

The cost is the rape of a principal as the centre of a black-comic hour. RTÉ received 17 complaints, nine by email and eight by phone, and the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre reported a sharp spike in calls; the row ran through Joe Duffy's Liveline. The same notices found the Dublin accents occasionally tipping the episode into unintentional humour. An average of 630,700 viewers watched, a 35 per cent share, though a later press report gave a higher figure and one encyclopaedia entry attaches yet another. This is the point at which Love/Hate became the show it is remembered as, the first episode of the run the press treated as a national event.