Residents of Carrigstown will soon get their own Lidl. The supermarket chain’s next store will be located in the fictional north Dublin suburb on the RTÉ soap opera Fair City in what is said to be the largest product placement deal on Irish television.
The German-owned retailer and RTÉ have “turned the sod” on the new store on the Fair City set at RTÉ‘s Montrose campus in Donnybrook, Dublin, as part of a three-year product placement deal.
Lidl’s brand is expected to feature on screen for the first time in early summer.
The price of the deal was not revealed due to commercial sensitivity. But when RTÉ sought expressions of interest in mid-2024, the broadcaster suggested the package was worth €624,000 based on the previous year.
“The shop is a central meeting point for the community and this collaboration opens up exciting new storytelling possibilities,” Fair City executive producer Brigie de Courcy said.
Lidl will replace the Carrigstown Spar, which suffered an on-screen flood in a storyline shown in the soap’s St Stephen’s Day episode. Characters in the show have established a pop-up community shop in the interim.
Spar’s product placement in Fair City was the first arrangement of its kind for RTÉ when it was announced in November 2011, originally as a three-year deal with a price tag of €900,000.
The move to transform Phelan’s Corner Shop into a Spar came just months after the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland, the media regulator in place at the time, decided to allow paid product placement on Irish television in line with a relaxation of EU regulations.
Lidl said its Carrigstown store would feature a realistic shop interior and exterior set designed by the retailer in collaboration with RTÉ.
It will also feature a welfare area for employees, electric vehicle charging points, an in-store bakery and even a Re-turn scheme machine for drinks cans and plastic bottles.
Lidl Ireland senior project manager Tom Mughal said Fair City was “synonymous with Irish culture” and that the deal would further extend awareness of its brand.
The arrival of the retailer to Fair City comes as RTÉ is seeking to move the soap opera off-site with a view to it being made by an external production company, or companies, rather than by in-house staff.
The change has been flagged as an important component of RTÉ director general Kevin Bakhurst’s five-year strategy for the organisation, which was unveiled in 2024.
Further updates are expected this year, in part because Cairn Homes, which acquired just under nine acres of land from RTÉ in 2017, has recently started construction works on the first phase of its 608-unit apartment scheme on the site.
This land sale prompted the relocation of the Fair City set to another part of the campus. However, the capacity of noise from the neighbouring construction site to interfere with filming has hastened an RTÉ plan to move it away from Donnybrook completely.
Fair City debuted on RTÉ One in September 1989, more than four years after the BBC’s successful launch of London-set soap EastEnders. Fair City dropped back to three episodes a week for a spell last year as a result of financial stresses at RTÉ, but it has since resumed its schedule of four episodes a week.
The RTÉ product placement opportunity document indicates that in the first three months of last year, each episode had an average audience of 331,000 on RTÉ One, with an additional 35,000 viewers on RTÉ Player. On a weekly basis, the soap reaches more than 600,000 viewers.
