How Ireland built thriving film and TV production companies

At some point the green wave is no longer a wave, but the waterline. Ireland no longer needs to announce its arrival on the global screen. It just keeps delivering.

Manufacturing spending reached a record €544 million ($632.7 million) in 2025, up 26% from the previous year, all against the backdrop of global industry disruption.

Irish creative talent has been nominated at the Academy Awards for acting, visual effects and animation. And “Hamnet,” starring Irish actors Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal, won best drama and best actress at the Golden Globes and won outstanding British film and best actress at the BAFTAs. It has also been nominated for eight Oscars.

So the question is no longer whether the Irish screen and talent can compete globally, but how it built something so sustainable – and how far it can go.

“It has been another incredible year for the industry,” said Désirée Finnegan, Managing Director of Screen Ireland, the national agency for Irish film, television drama, animation and documentary. “It really shows how skilled Irish makers are [span] so many fields. Maintaining our focus on investing in talent support – across all disciplines, in front of and behind the camera – is critical for us to remain consistently at that level.”

This year’s Oscar nominations bring a remarkable slate of awards. Buckley — who has already won actress trophies at both the Golden Globes and BAFTAs for her performance in “Hamnet” — earned an Academy Award nomination in the same category. Her Hamnet co-star Mescal won the supporting actress award at the Irish Film and Television Awards. Irish FX wiz Richard Baneham won a BAFTA and earned an Oscar nomination for visual effects for “Avatar: Fire and Ash.” Other Irish Oscar nominees include ‘Retirement Plan’, an animated short film funded by Screen Ireland and RTÉ through their Frameworks program and directed by John Kelly and narrated by Domhnall Gleeson; and Element Pictures, which earned its fourth best picture nomination, this time for “Bugonia.” Element’s first best picture was just ten years ago for “Room”; The company’s ‘Pillion’ received BAFTA nominations for outstanding British film, screenplay and outstanding debut. Element’s projects have earned 30 Academy Award nominations in 10 years.

It’s a record that Element producer Emma Norton, whose credits include ‘Normal People’ and ‘Pillion’, attributes to more than luck. “It’s really been an explosion of growth,” she says, having worked in Ireland since 2008 during the recession and pandemic. “Central to this is of course the investment in Screen Ireland, which has reached its highest level this year, and the increase in tax benefits. Everything is aimed at supporting that growth.”

She also points to the cumulative effect of Irish actors breaking through globally. “A lot of it has to do with people like Paul Mescal going out into the world and becoming internationally recognized,” she says. “These talents are very proud of where they come from and are determined to keep Ireland in the conversation.”

The main Irish tax incentive for the screen industry, Section 481, provides a credit of up to 32% on eligible Irish expenditure. The eligibility ceiling has been increased to €125 million ($145.4 million), up from a previous ceiling of €70 million ($81.4 million), and the exemption has been extended until December 2028. But the most significant policy development from the latest budget is an increased tax credit rate of 40% for visual effects work, applicable to productions with a minimum of €1 million ($1.2 million) in eligible VFX expenditure, with a ceiling of €10 million ($11.6 million) per project. The government has designed the measure to help Ireland better compete with countries such as Britain, France, New Zealand and Canada, which already offer specialist incentives for impact-intensive productions.

For Jake Walshe, president and CEO of Screen Scene Post Production Group and chairman of VFX Ireland, the new credit marks a decisive shift in Ireland’s competitive position. Celebrating its 41st year, Screen Scene was the first company to use Section 481 for post-production and visual effects on Season 1 of “Game of Thrones.” Since then, Irish VFX studios have worked on productions such as ‘Shōgun’, ‘The Penguin’ and countless major studio projects.

“We’re getting a huge amount of interest now because the numbers are clearly good,” says Walshe. He notes that the credit also allows productions to stack post-production spend on top of VFX at the same pace, opening up an attractive proposition for international producers looking to consolidate their post-pipeline. “A lot of people are very interested in adding mail to it as well,” he says. “If they spent $1 million on visual effects, they could also effectively expand post-production by 40%. It really opens a very interesting door for a lot of producers.”

However, capacity remains the most important question; according to Walshe, the industry is actively working to answer these. To address this, Screen Ireland has established five National Talent Academies covering live action, animation and VFX, each with industry representation on its steering groups, and with geographically distributed crew hubs across the country. The agency recorded more than 6,500 skills placements in the sector in 2025 alone, and more than 18,000 since 2021.

Finnegan points to 2019 as a structural turning point, when Ireland became one of the first countries in Europe to link its tax incentives directly to skills development. “That has really allowed us to assess where there may be skills gaps and respond accordingly, and to have a structural approach to skills development.” She adds that the academies are designed with inclusion as an explicit goal, with an emphasis on geographic distribution and underrepresented communities. It is also, she says, where Ireland is experiencing “a new era of creative confidence” – one that spans film, theatre, literature and music. “It speaks to the fusion and exchange that is happening in the arts in Ireland at the moment.”

For Lee Cronin, the Irish director behind “Evil Dead Rise” – which grossed $150 million worldwide for Warner Bros. – Ireland’s evolution as a manufacturing base is something he experiences every day. Based in Ireland and operating through his production company Wicked/Good, Cronin recently shot “Lee Cronin’s The Mummy” at a facility in central Dublin before heading straight to a color suite.

The film will premiere this spring via Warner Bros. Despite the story being partly set in New Mexico and Egypt, Cronin built a studio in Ireland and has largely set all of his feature films in the country. He cites Peter Jackson’s development of a genre production infrastructure in New Zealand as an ambitious model.
“We have almost everything we need on the island,” Cronin said. Its only identified gap: a shortage of Dolby Atmos mixing stages. “If we can get one or two of them up and running, we’ll have all the capabilities we need. That’s something I would be very much in favor of trying to make happen.”

He also points to the improved VFX tax credit as tangible evidence of progress, noting the presence of “some really robust visual effects companies” that genre productions depend on. Looking further ahead, Cronin details Wicked/Good’s ambitions to become an identifiable force in genre cinema, citing Jackson’s WingNut Films and the Weta ecosystem as benchmarks.

The broader challenge for the industry is one of balance: ensuring that a thriving market for international inbound production does not displace the indigenous stories that have defined Ireland’s global reputation. Rebecca O’Flanagan, managing director of Treasure Entertainment, whose work focuses on Irish stories and filmmakers, describes this as an ongoing but so far well-managed tension.

“There is a co-dependency on both sides of the industry,” she says. “There are some huge international productions coming in – which can put a strain on the indigenous industry in terms of crews and studios. So we’re all very aware of that.” She points to Screen Ireland as an organization that oversees what she calls “that very delicate ecosystem”, adding that the two parties have proven mutually beneficial to date.

Norton agrees that the balance currently holds. “The concern you ever have is that the larger-scale projects will overshadow the ability to maintain those smaller projects. But right now I think that balance is there.”

She notes that crews can move smoothly between the biggest international productions — she cites the “Wednesday” series, which was filmed in Ireland — and smaller domestic projects, keeping staff employed and artistically engaged. The challenge on the TV side, she adds, is that domestic programs still require international partnerships to arrive at a feasible budget. “We still can’t finance Irish shows exclusively from Ireland,” says Norton. “You still need those partnerships to fund those shows at a manageable level.”

Screen Ireland’s slate of 87 projects for 2026 – 22 feature films, 17 documentaries and 13 TV dramas or animated series – reflects the scale of the agency’s investment. Expanding its scope beyond film to TV drama and digital games, it has also launched ‘Where to Watch Ireland’, a platform designed to bring Irish film and television to US and international audiences. Screen Ireland’s Los Angeles office, opened in 2019 next to the Irish Consulate, serves as a base for developing creative co-productions with US studios and streamers.

No conversation about the future of Ireland’s screen industry escapes the issue of AI. For Walshe, it’s less of a threat than an accelerator. “From an AI perspective, we’re honestly pretty excited about it,” he says. “It’s been in our workflows for a while; it’s embedded in the software that is constantly being updated.”

He acknowledges that artists are “skeptical and anxious,” but draws on three decades of industry experience to contextualize the fear. “We’ve had huge software changes. We always have. We’re skeptical of things until they happen, and then we see that there’s really a lot of value in this.”

O’Flanagan is measured but optimistic. “While we’re at kind of an important threshold when we look at things like AI,” she says, “I think we always derive hope and optimism from the fact that those unique voices and storytellers will always be something that the industry values.”

Ireland’s audiovisual industry is now valued at over €1 billion in gross value added, supporting over 15,800 full-time jobs. For Finnegan, the numbers are only meaningful to the extent that they reflect the health of the talent ecosystem on which they are built.

“We are a creative company and the human experience is at the heart of creating work that connects with audiences,” she says. “Whatever the disruption is – that human experience, where the artist is at the heart of everything we do – that will simply continue to be at the center of everything we do.”