Here’s how First Dates Ireland match up their couples

The restaurant opens tonight.

First Dates Ireland airs on RTÉ2 tonight and audiences will be treated to an insightful, touching and funny look at how people find love in modern Ireland. We got an exclusive glimpse at the very first episode and we're delighted to say that it's everything that you would expect. Touching, sweet, a little bit cringy, but very funny. Maître d’ Mateo Sania and his team - barman Ethan Miles and waitress Alice Carr - are ready and waiting to welcome singletons from all over the country to the First Dates restaurant in the hope of finding love.  With over 150 hopeful couples, aged between 18 and 75,  looking for love, you'd be excused for thinking that this task is practically impossible but fear not because the talented production team at COCO TV are here to be your TV cupids. Linda Cullen, Head of Television with COCO, has shed some light on the process of finding and matching daters on First Dates' Ireland. "It's a lengthy process that starts with an application at the beginning, which moves onto an hour long phone call with potential candidates. We're going for people who we think are very good characters that are genuinely looking for love. We're trying to gauge who would fit together based on age, hobbies, interests, background etc.." "We spent a lot of time looking at the boards on our walls. Our walls in the office are covered with the details and photos of daters along with the type of people that we're trying to match them with. "We had terrible fights at times trying to match the right couples, we argued like cats and dogs, because someone would say 'but she's been hurt in the past and this guy has said that he's been unfaithful before', that sort of thing." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8P4ROVY8s70 Regarding the specific details of what makes a really good match on First Dates Ireland, Cullen says, "We do ask what the person's looking for. Do they like tall/short people? Would dating someone with kids put them off? Would you date someone beyond their ethnicity etc? Then we get a bit more specific with questions like 'where did you learn about love?, 'what's your dealbreaker?' We ask these questions because we really want to get a good idea of the people that we're dealing with". Finding love in the real world can be a lengthy process and it's no different for the people making the show according to Cullen, "The matching process took months to do and we felt so guilty at times because we weren't able to use all these fantastic characters that applied to be on the show. "We weren't going to just throw people on the show if we felt that they wouldn't fit together with someone else. We have a list of people though that we would definitely go to again if there's another series because we really want to find them a match". First Dates Ireland starts on RTÉ2 on Thursday, 21 April at 9.30pm.  Tune in to see if the daters find love or if they end up dashing for the door.  Clips and images via RTÉ