Katie Byrne

So the mixture of, I think, the absurdity of the story and how

local it was and how many people had actually had direct contact with it, I think just led it to really taking off.

And I think it's probably still their biggest podcast to date, the part three follow up that they did years later.

So they said that they had gotten even more messages from men who were caught up in all of this towards the end of 2024.

And then January 2025, they kind of come out of nowhere and say, we've got an update to the GAA catfish story.

It was an interesting addition to their podcast offering, I think, because if you actually listen to it, it's a lot of kind of like really slick sound design and voiceover and that kind of thing.

It was almost like a documentary style kind of a feature and really got into the psychology of how deep this story went, how many men were affected and the way that it affected them it touched on.

When people get catfished, I think it's very easy to maybe ridicule someone or say like, why weren't you more careful?

But it really got into like, some people are really lonely and that's something that's growing and growing among younger people nowadays in the social media age that we're in.

A fascinating story and also a big boon for them because it brought in millions and millions of downloads.

I think that part three of the series got over two million listens in just a very short period of time.

Yes, so they were brought on board to do a podcast that was promoting working in the Irish prison service.

And it was basically just a couple of members of the IPS talking about what life was like working in the prison service and trying to help with a recruitment drive for getting people into work there.

And they were paid the guts of €25,000 for that gig.

But what's interesting on the flip side of that is they did a similar podcast called

promoting recruitment to on Garda Síochána, trying to get people to join the guards.

And Garda Commissioner Justin Kelly came out and said, well, unlike the Irish Prison Service, we actually didn't pay them a dime for that.

So on the one hand, you have a big chunk of public money going to the two Johnnies to promote the Irish Prison Service.

On the other, they did it for the guards for free.

Who knows how or why that was the case, but an interesting example of how public money is used in these kind of new media ways to promote different things.