These Sacred Vows is a 2026 Irish mystery comedy-drama.
The six-part series centers around an Irish wedding in Spain, where a week of day-drinking and chaotic nights release secret fears and jealousy and desire bubbles to the surface. It opens the morning after the wedding, when the body of a priest is found floating face-down in the swimming pool of the young guests’ villa. Over the course of the series, the action jumps back in time to revisit key events of a wild previous week, each from the perspective of a different character.
The series premiered on RTÉ One in Ireland on 1 February, 2026.
Previews: Official Trailer
Tropes:
- Age-Gap Romance: Cormac, a college friend of the bride's, begins an affair with Jerry, her father, who is at least twice his age.
- Ambiguous Ending: Invoked with Father's Vincent's final words that close out the series.
- Ass Shove: When Father Vincent informs Jerry that the local priest wants €2000 for use of his church, Jerry responds, "You tell him what he can do with his fucking €2000".
- Brainless Beauty: The studly, young Aaron's level of attractiveness is commented on by various characters, but his lack of maturity and incapability of taking responsibility for his actions tend to put off anybody who might find him appealing.
- Bratty Teenage Daughter: Karen Byrne, the younger sister of the bride, is a downplayed example. She's frequently blunt to the point of rudeness, especially with strangers, but we're also seeing her at a difficult period of her life, which is likely having an effect on her behaviour; she recently found the Grindr app on her father's phone, assumed (rightfully) that he's been unfaithful to his wife, and is threatening to reveal the fact to her mother if he doesn't own up to it by the end of the holiday. And since Niamh is leaving the family, her father (may) leave the family, and her mother is not looking out for her, she is adamant that she should attend boarding school. The straw that breaks the camel's back is when she tries to drunkenly kiss Aaron and is rejected, and she steals a golf buggy, drives it off a pier, and runs away in a van with three strangers.
- Chekhov's Gag: Ava spends her episode periodically asking one of the other house guests to pick up and move the bag of coal since it is a trip hazard. At the disastrous dinner where tempers flare and she has a falling out with Cormac, Ava storms off and trips over the bag of coal, snapping her forearm. She is rushed to the hospital and Aaron finally moves the coal.
- Chekhov's Gun: After Ava's accident, the villa housemates start to police themselves and do their chores. Aaron finishes his breakfast cereal and does not clean up after himself one morning, but after some disapproving stares from the others, he half-heartedly puts the unwashed bowl back with the others. This is the same bowl that Father Vincent picks up to use for his breakfast — ostensibly, Aaron's cereal contained nuts, which Father Vincent is allergic to, and his allergic reaction leads to him drowning in the pool.
- Cut Himself Shaving: The handsome, young Cormac's face is visibly marked by a black eye that he explains away as being from a biking accident, though the reactions of his close friends and his own trauma over the incident makes it clear that it was anything but. After being challenged on the matter by Karen, irked by her dismissal of the homophobia he's been subjected to, Cormac reveals that he was attacked in a violent hate crime by a gang of teenagers (his own students, in fact) who entrapped him and beat him up.
- Dead Star Walking: Tom Vaughan-Lawlor, of Love/Hate fame, receives top billing for the series. It's the discovery of his character's dead body that opens the very first episode.
- First-Episode Twist: The first episode ends with The Reveal that Father Vincent is the biological father of the bride, Niamh Byrne.
- Food Slap: After being subject to his harassment and being reluctant to take it to the police, Elodie gets her own back in the moment by throwing wine in Fergal's face.
- The Generation Gap: An important recurring theme of the series is the conflict in ideals between the different generations of Irish people attending the wedding.
- In the first episode - which revolves around Father Vincent - the different attitudes of Irish people towards priests (and the Catholic Church in general) is examined. The older, middle-aged generation grew up during a time when the Church was still the be-all and end-all of political and social life in Ireland, and to them, priests like Vincent are a normal part of the community. The younger, more secular generation have a far-more cynical outlook, having witnessed the array of clerical abuse scandals in the public eye during a formative part of their youth; in their eyes, priests are sinister relics of a bygone age, and invariably guilty of either committing or abetting child abuse. This conflict in views results in the bride and groom seemingly being uninterested entirely in meeting the priest who their parents insisted upon inviting to officiate the wedding.
- The second episode, which focuses on Cormac, takes a look at differing attitudes towards gay people in Ireland. Among the 20-something crowd, there are multiple queer characters (including Cormac himself) whose presence is remarked upon, but not objected to, and Cormac specifically states that while the modern environment is safer for queer people now than it was when he was growing up, homophobia hasn't gone away entirely - a fact he can attest to all too well, being a recent victim of a hate crime. For the older generation, openly-gay people are something of a novelty and a curiosity, which results in Cormac being peppered with awkward questions when the topic of his gayness comes up over dinner. Also included in that generation is the closeted Jerry, who has been determinedly hiding his same-gender attraction from his wife, his family, his friends, and colleagues for decades, convinced that his outing would ruin his life. Meanwhile, Karen represents the voice of the younger, post-Marriage Equality generation - believing that homophobic violence is a thing of the past, and queer people are so normalised as to be unremarkable. Cormac is soon to correct her on the matter, however, informing her that his attackers were people her own age.
- Gym Bunny: Cormac, who still insists on going to the gym during his holiday overseas (despite the protests of fellow gay man, Glen, who thinks he should be taking it easy instead). Even when he's not in the gym, Cormac is shown to be consistently daydreaming about swimming and keeping active. It's implied that this is at least partly in order to keep his thoughts from dwelling on the recent violent homophobic attack he was the victim of.
- Have a Gay Old Time: Caroline enthuses about the vivacity and youth of Cormac and Ava, telling them that they're "full of jizz" (much to their amusement).
- Heroic BSoD: Vincent suffers this at the end of the first episode when he learns that Niamh is his daughter. It results in drinking some vodka (the first time he has drunk in years) before deciding to jump into the pool.
- How We Got Here: The series opens with Vincent's body being found in a pool. It then cuts back to a week earlier.
- Implausible Deniability:
- Jerry insists to Cormac that he has been 100% faithful to his wife for three decades. Cormac is understandably sceptical, given that the two of them have already cruised each other in the showers earlier that day (which Jerry claims wasn't technically cheating, since there was no physical contact between them) Jerry also has an active Grindr account, but he acts as though this doesn't count, either, since he's only "window shopping".
- Cormac returns the favour by telling Jerry that he's not interested in an affair with a closeted, married man who barely even wants to be seen with him in public. Guess whose guts Cormac is rearranging by the end of the episode?
- Kids Raiding the Wine Cabinet: Karen engages in a variation of the normal trope — she offers to have her mother supply more alcohol to the villa guests. When Sandra makes her promise that the alcohol is for the villa guests only, she lies and agrees. When they bring the alcohol to the villa, Karen proceeds to openly drink despite the objections of some of the adults.
- Making Love in All the Wrong Places: Jerry and Cormac get in on in the bunker of a golf course at the climax of episode 2.
- Off the Wagon: It's strongly implied (given his friend's comments on his wild youth) that Father Vincent is a recovering alcoholic. He spends much of the first episode adamantly refusing so much as a drop of wine in spite of many offers. After being informed that he's the biological father of the bride, however, he becomes so distraught that he starts downing a bottle of vodka. A later episode has him recognise the downward spiral he's landed himself in, and he attends an AA meeting as part of his recovery.
- One-Drop Rule: Ava's boyfriend Felix is the lone Brit among the named characters (who are mostly Irish). When he finds himself repeating stereotypes of Irish people and offending other parties, he plays defensive and insists that because he is of Welsh descent, he is also a "Celt."
- Precocious Crush: The 14-year-old Karen has a crush on the handsome 27-year-old Aaron and confides her crush in Elodie. Elodie thinks he's too old, but then Karen tries to twist the "half your age plus 7" rule by reasoning that she is a teenager, 19 is also a teen, and 19 is close enough to 20.5. Aaron humours her, but he is not into her the same way that she is into him. When she tries to kiss him, he pushes her away.
- Predatory Pervert: Fergal, a friend of Jerry and Sandra, openly ogles Elodie (a teen). When nobody is looking, he strokes her leg with his golf club and whispers some sexual overtones.
- Red Herring: Given that the series opens with Vincent's demise before rewinding to a week prior, the audience is given a multitude of potential causes or motives for his death - most of which amount to nothing:
- Rory's dislike of Vincent is made clear from the very first episode, and by the series' end, he's the only one who hasn't come around on him. He even later goes so far as to suggest that somebody should murder Vincent. In the end, he has nothing to do with Vincent's death.
- Vincent's decent into alcoholism over the course of the series' first half leads him down a dark path. But by the final episode, he's cleaned up his act once again, and is completely sober when he has his fatal accident.
- Rotating Protagonist: Each of the first five episodes focuses on a different character (Father Vincent, Cormac, Sandra, Ava, and Elodie), with episode 6 having an Ensemble Cast to close out the series.
- Rule of Three: Three different people shout "Brits out!" at Felix as he storms out of the wedding.
- Shout-Out: When Elodie is stung by a jellyfish, Karen asks Vincent to urinate on the burn because she saw it happen in an episode of Friends, referring to the episode "The One with the Jellyfish".
- Shower Scene: Episode 2 has multiple involving Cormac at the gym. Importantly, the first involves him cruising a man who turns out to be Jerry, the father of the same wedding Cormac has travelled to attend.
- Surprisingly Happy Ending: For all the cynicism displayed throughout the series, the final episode leaves things on quite an optimistic note: the wedding goes off without a hitch; Sandra and Jerry remain together, with Karen deciding not to go to boarding school; Cormac and Ava reconcile, with the latter dumping her asshole boyfriend for good measure; and Claire gets both the sculpture commission and her best friend back. Even Vincent's death turns out to have been a random accident rather than foul play, and his final words imply that he may have gone to a better place.
- Team Mom: Ava becomes the default Team Mom of the villa as she tries to keep house while the (mostly) male guests shirk any responsibilities. She frequently picks up after them, wakes them up each morning, corral them into doing the shopping, and asks them to move the coal and ends up doing the chores herself. These stressors, compounded by her scumbag boyfriend's arrival and witnessing her friend Cormac engaging in an affair with the father of the bride, makes her feel unappreciated and unheard. When she breaks her arm, she leaves the villa and stays in a different accommodation.
- Undignified Death: The series begins with Father Vincent's body being discovered floating face-down in a swimming pool. To make matters worse, the person who finds the body is a random golfer who accidentally hit the ball into the back garden containing the pool, and rather than fishing poor Vincent's lifeless carcass out of the water, proceeds to give him a poke with the end of his golf club before promptly grabbing the ball and walking away. Made worse when the final episode reveals how he died; he was having breakfast by the pool when he started to choke due to his nut allergy, and when he started to head back inside, he slipped and hit his head before falling into the pool.
- Unseen No More: The bride and groom, Niamh and Derek, are nowhere to be seen in most of the episodes despite being mentioned frequently by the wedding guests and the bride's family. Often, the episode's protagonist will wake up to be told that they have "just" missed Niamh. Niamh is not seen onscreen even at her own hen party. The couple finally make an onscreen appearance only in the final episode of the series, which is the day of the wedding.
- Wounded Gazelle Gambit: During a discussion with Father Vincent, the local priest not-so subtly insists that the church won't be able to facilitate the wedding unless the bride's family are willing to provide a "donation" of €2000, and plays up the parish as being very poor and community-driven. When Vincent arrives for a regular service the next day, however, he finds the church full to the brim with congregants - strongly implying that the priest was exaggerating just how dire the church's finances were.