At some point, the green waves stop being waves and begin to become water lines. Ireland no longer needs to announce its arrival on the global film stage. It just keeps delivering.
Against a backdrop of global industrial disruption, production spending in 2025 hit a record high of 544 million euros ($632.7 million), an increase of 26% from the previous year. Irish creative talent has been nominated for Academy Awards in the acting, visual effects and animation categories. And Hamnet, starring Irish actors Jesse Buckley and Paul Mescal, won the Golden Globe for Best Drama and Best Actress, and the BAFTA for Outstanding British Film and Best Actress. It has also been nominated for eight Oscars. The question is no longer whether Irish films and talent can compete globally, but how they built something so durable, and how far they can go.
“It’s been another great year for the industry,” said Desiree Finnegan, chief executive of Screen Ireland, the national distributor of Irish film, TV drama, animation and documentaries. “This really shows how skilled Irish creators are across many disciplines. Our continued focus on investing in talent support across all craft disciplines, in front of and behind the camera, is key to ensuring we consistently maintain that level.”
This year’s Oscar nominations add to a remarkable list of awards. Buckley has already won actress trophies at both the Golden Globe and BAFTA for her performance in Hamnet, and was nominated for an Academy Award in the same category. Mescal, who co-starred in Hamnet, won the Irish Film and Television Award for Best Supporting Actor. Irish FX master Richard Benham won a BAFTA and was nominated for a Visual Effects Oscar for Avatar: Fire and Ash. Other Irish Oscar nominees include Retirement Plan, an animated short directed by John Kelly and voiced by Domhnall Gleeson, financed by Screen Ireland and RTÉ through the Frameworks scheme. Element Pictures has earned its fourth Best Picture nomination, this time for “Bugonia.” Element’s first Best Picture award was just 10 years ago for “Room.” The company’s ‘Pillion’ was nominated for a BAFTA for outstanding British film, screenplay and outstanding debut feature. Element’s projects have garnered a total of 30 Academy Award nominations in 10 years.
Element producer Emma Norton, whose credits include “Normal People” and “Pillion,” believes the record is more than a blessing in disguise. “It’s been really explosive growth,” says the actress, who has worked in Ireland since 2008 and has worked through recessions and pandemics. “At the heart of this is obviously the expansion of investment and tax incentives into Screen Ireland, which has reached its highest levels this year, all aimed at supporting its growth.”
She also points to the cumulative effect of Irish actors breaking out internationally. “A lot of it has to do with people like Paul Mescal going out into the world and gaining international recognition,” she says. “These talented people are really proud of where they come from and are really committed to putting Ireland in the conversation.”
Section 481, Ireland’s main film industry tax benefit, provides up to a 32% deduction on eligible Irish expenditure. The eligibility cap has been increased to 125 million euros ($145.4 million) from the previous cap of 70 million euros ($81.4 million), and the relief has been extended until December 2028. However, the highlight policy development from the latest budget is a 40% increase in the reduced tax rate for visual effects productions, which will apply to productions with a minimum of €1 million ($1.2 million) of eligible VFX spending and a cap of €10 million. ($11.6 million) per project. The Government designed the measure to make Ireland more competitive with countries such as the UK, France, New Zealand and Canada, which already offer special incentives for impact-based productions.
For Jake Walshe, President and CEO of Screen Scene Post Production Group and Chairman of VFX Ireland, this new credit marks a decisive shift in Ireland’s competitive position. Screen Scene, now in its 41st year, was the first company to apply Section 481 to post-production and visual effects for Season 1 of Game of Thrones. Since then, the Irish VFX studio has worked on productions including ‘Shogun’, ‘Penguin’ and a number of major studio projects.
“There’s obviously a lot of interest right now because the numbers are good,” Walsh said. He points out that this credit also allows production companies to stack post-production costs in equal proportion on top of VFX, making it an attractive proposition for international producers looking to consolidate their post pipelines. “A lot of people are very interested in adding posts,” he says. “If you spend $1 million on visual effects, you can effectively add post-production at 40%. That opens up some very interesting doors for a lot of producers.”
But capacity remains a key question, and Walsh says the industry is actively working on answers. To address this, Screen Ireland has established five National Talent Academies covering live action, animation and VFX. Each academy includes industry representatives on its steering committee and includes geographically dispersed crew hubs across the country. The agency recorded more than 6,500 skills placements across the sector in 2025 alone, and more than 18,000 in 2021 and beyond.
Mr Finnegan points to 2019, when Ireland became one of the first countries in Europe to link tax incentives directly to skills development, as a structural turning point. “This has enabled us to assess where there may be skills gaps and respond accordingly, establishing a structured approach to skills development.” She added that the academy is geographically spread out, focused on underrepresented communities, and designed with inclusion as an explicit goal. She says Ireland is experiencing a “new era of creative confidence” across film, theatre, literature and music. “This speaks to the fusion and exchange that is happening across Irish art at the moment.”
For Lee Cronin, the Irish director of Warner Bros.’ “Evil Dead Rises,” which grossed $150 million worldwide, the evolution of Ireland as a production hub is something he experiences every day. Cronin, who is based in Ireland and works through his production company Wicked/Good, recently picture-locked “Lee Cronin’s The Mummy” at a venue in Dublin city center before heading straight to the color suite. The film will be released this spring through Warner Bros. Although parts of the story are set in New Mexico and Egypt, Cronin has set up a studio in Ireland and releases all of his work primarily domestically. He cites Peter Jackson’s development of genre production infrastructure in New Zealand as an aspirational model.
“The island has pretty much everything you need,” Cronin says. One gap he identified was the lack of a Dolby Atmos mixing stage. “If we can do one or two of those things, we have all the capabilities we need, and I would wholeheartedly support that happening.”
He also cited the strengthening of the VFX tax credit as tangible evidence of progress, noting the existence of “some really strong visual effects companies” that genre productions rely on. Looking further ahead, Cronin spoke of his ambitions for Wicked to become a distinct force in genre cinema, citing Jackson’s Wingnut films and Weta’s ecosystem as benchmarks.
The broader challenge for the industry is one of balance. It is about ensuring that the burgeoning market for international inbound productions does not crowd out 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 codependency on both sides of the industry,” she says. “There are big international productions coming in and that can put a strain on the indigenous industry in terms of staff and studios, so we are all very conscious of that.” She points out that Screen Ireland is an organization that oversees what she calls “a very delicate ecosystem”, adding that so far both have proven mutually beneficial.
Norton agrees that the balance remains current. “The worry that you have is that the big projects will eat into your ability to keep the smaller projects going. But I think we’ve got that balance right now.”
She points out that the ability for staff to move fluidly between large-scale international productions (she cited the “Wednesday” series shot in Ireland) and smaller domestic projects keeps them employed and involved in the arts. The challenge on the TV side is that domestic programming still requires international partnerships to achieve viable budgets, she added. “We still can’t fund Irish performances solely from within Ireland,” Norton says. “We still need these partnerships to fund our shows at a manageable level.”
Screen Ireland’s 87 projects scheduled for 2026 (22 feature films, 17 documentaries and 13 TV dramas or animated series) reflect the breadth of the agency’s investments. Its remit extends beyond film to include television drama and digital games, and it has also launched Where to Watch Ireland, a platform aimed at bringing Irish film and television to audiences in the United States and around the world. Screen Ireland’s Los Angeles office opened in 2019 next to the Irish Consulate General and serves as a hub for creative co-production development with US studios and streamers.
No discussion of the future of the Irish film industry can avoid the issue of AI. For Walsh, it’s more of an accelerant than a threat. “From an AI perspective, we’re honestly very excited about this,” he says. “This has been part of our workflow for quite some time and is built into software that is constantly being updated.”
He acknowledges that artists are “skeptical and anxious,” but cites 30 years of experience in the business to contextualize that anxiety. “We’ve been making major software changes, which is always the case. We’re skeptical of things until they happen, but then we see there’s really good value in this.”
O’Flanagan is cautiously optimistic. “We’re at kind of a critical threshold when we’re looking at things like AI, but I think we always have hope and optimism from the fact that these unique voices and storytellers are always going to be valued in the industry,” she says.
Ireland’s audiovisual industry is currently valued at over €1 billion ($1.16 billion) in gross value added and supports over 15,800 full-time equivalent jobs. For Finnegan, this number is only meaningful if it reflects the health of the underlying talent ecosystem.
“We are a creative business and the human experience is at the heart of creating work that connects with our audiences,” she says. “No matter what the disruption is, whether it’s the human experience or whether the artist is at the center of everything we do, it remains at the center of everything we do.”
