At some point, the green wave stops being a wave and starts being the waterline. Ireland doesn’t need to announce its arrival on the global screen stage anymore. It just keeps delivering.
Production spend hit a record €544 million ($632.7 million) in 2025, a 26% jump on the previous year, all against a backdrop of global industry disruption. Irish creative talent is nominated at the Academy Awards in 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 took outstanding British film and best actress at the BAFTAs. It’s also nominated for eight Oscars. The question is no longer whether Irish screen and talents can compete globally, but how it built something this durable — and how far it can go.
“It’s been another incredible year for the industry,” says Désirée Finnegan, chief executive of Screen Ireland, the national agency for Irish film, television drama, animation and documentary. “It really showcases how skilled Irish creators [span] so many disciplines. Maintaining that emphasis on investment in talent support — across all the craft areas, in front and behind the camera — is critical for us to stay consistently at that level.”
This year’s Oscar nominations extend a remarkable awards run. Buckley — who has already won actress trophies at both the Golden Globes and the BAFTAs for her performance in “Hamnet” — earned an Academy Award nomination in the same category. Her ”Hamnet” co-star Mescal won the supporting actor prize at the Irish Film and Television Awards. Irish FX wiz Richard Baneham won a BAFTA and earned a visual effects Oscar nomination for “Avatar: Fire and Ash.” Other Irish Oscar nominees include ”Retirement Plan,” an animated short funded by Screen Ireland and RTÉ through its Frameworks scheme and directed by John Kelly and voiced by Domhnall Gleeson; Element Pictures, which earned its fourth best picture nomination, this time for for “Bugonia.” Element’s first best pic nom was just a decade ago for “Room”; the company’s “Pillion” received BAFTA nominations for outstanding British film, screenplay and outstanding debut. Element’s projects have accumulated 30 Academy Award nominations in 10 years.
It is a record that Element producer Emma Norton, whose credits include “Normal People” and “Pillion,” attributes to more than good fortune. “It really has been an explosion of growth,” she says, having worked in Ireland since 2008 and across the recession and the pandemic. “Central to that is obviously the investment in Screen Ireland, which this year has hit its highest level, and the increase in the tax incentives. Everything has been aimed towards 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 just being so internationally recognized,” she says. “These talents are really proud of where they’re from and really committed to keeping Ireland in the conversation.”
Ireland’s primary screen industry tax incentive, Section 481, provides a credit of up to 32% on eligible Irish expenditure. The eligibility cap has been raised to €125 million ($145.4 million), up from a previous ceiling of €70 million ($81.4 million), and the relief extended to December 2028. But the headline policy development from the most recent budget is an enhanced 40% tax relief rate for visual effects work, applicable to productions with a minimum of €1 million ($1.2 million) in eligible VFX expenditure, with a cap of €10 million ($11.6 million) per project. The government designed the measure to help Ireland better compete with countries like the U.K., France, New Zealand and Canada, which already provide specialized incentives for effects-intensive productions.
For Jake Walshe, president and CEO of Screen Scene Post Production Group and chair of VFX Ireland, the new credit marks a decisive shift in Ireland’s competitive position. Screen Scene, which is celebrating its 41st year, 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 including “Shōgun,” “The Penguin” and numerous major studio projects.
“We’re getting a massive amount of interest now, because obviously the number is good,” says Walshe. He notes that the credit also permits productions to stack post-production spend on top of VFX at the same rate, which opens a compelling proposition for international producers looking to consolidate their post pipeline. “A lot of people are very interested in adding post into it as well,” he says. “If they were to place $1 million in visual effects, they could effectively add on the post-production as well at 40%. It really opens a really interesting door for a lot of producers.”
Capacity, however, remains the principal question — one Walshe says the industry is actively working to answer. To address this, Screen Ireland has established five National Talent Academies covering live action, animation and VFX, each with industry representation on its steering committees, and including geographically dispersed crew hubs across the country. The agency logged more than 6,500 skills placements across the sector in 2025 alone, and over 18,000 since 2021.
Finnegan points to 2019 as a structural inflection point, when Ireland became one of the first countries in Europe to link its tax incentive directly to skills development. “That’s really enabled 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 a focus on geographic spread and underrepresented communities. It is also, she says, where Ireland is “seeing a new era of creative confidence” — one that extends across film, theater, literature and music. “It speaks to the fusion and exchange happening across the arts in Ireland at the moment.”
For Lee Cronin, the Irish director behind “Evil Dead Rise” — which grossed $150 million globally for Warner Bros. — Ireland’s evolution as a production base is something he experiences day-to-day. Based in Ireland and operating through his production company Wicked/Good, Cronin recently picture-locked “Lee Cronin’s The Mummy” at a Dublin City Center facility before heading straight across to a color suite. The film opens this spring via Warner Bros. Despite a narrative set partly in New Mexico and Egypt, Cronin built a studio in Ireland and has posted all of his features largely in-country. He cites Peter Jackson’s development of a genre production infrastructure in New Zealand as an aspirational model.
“We kind of have almost everything we need on the island,” says Cronin. His one identified gap: a shortage of Dolby Atmos mixing stages. “If we can get one or two of those running, we have all of the necessary capability. That’s something I’d be a real proponent of trying to see happen.”
He also points to the enhanced 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 describes ambitions for Wicked/Good to become an identifiable force in genre cinema, citing Jackson’s WingNut Films and the Weta ecosystem as a benchmark.
The broader challenge for the industry is one of balance — ensuring that a booming market in international inbound production does not crowd out the indigenous storytelling that has 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. “You have some huge international productions that come in — that can put a strain on the indigenous industry in terms of crews and studios. So we’re all very conscious of that.” She points to Screen Ireland as an organization that monitors what she calls “that very delicate ecosystem,” adding that, so far, the two sides have proven mutually beneficial.
Norton agrees that the balance is currently holding. “The worry that you ever have is that the larger scale projects will eclipse the ability to keep those smaller projects being made. But at the moment, I think that balance is there.”
She notes that crews can move fluidly between the largest international productions — she cites series ”Wednesday,” which filmed in Ireland — and smaller domestic projects, keeping the workforce employed and artistically engaged. The challenge on the TV side, she adds, is that domestic shows still require international partnerships to reach a viable budget. “We still can’t fund Irish shows solely out of Ireland,” says Norton. “You still need those partnerships to finance those shows at a manageable level.”
Screen Ireland’s 2026 slate of 87 projects — 22 feature films, 17 documentaries and 13 TV dramas or animated series — reflects the breadth of the agency’s investment. Its remit has expanded beyond film into TV drama and digital games, and it has also launched “Where to Watch Ireland,” a platform designed to bring Irish film and television to U.S. and international audiences. Screen Ireland’s Los Angeles office, opened in 2019 alongside the Irish consulate, serves as a base for creative co-production development with U.S. studios and streamers.
No conversation about the Irish screen industry’s future escapes the question of AI. For Walshe, it is less a threat than an accelerant. “From an AI perspective, we’re quite excited about it, to be honest,” he says. “It’s been in our workflows for quite some time — it’s embedded in the software that’s been updated all the time.”
He acknowledges that artists are “skeptical and apprehensive,” but draws on three decades in the business to contextualize the anxiety. “We’ve had massive software changes. That’s always the way — we’re skeptical of things until they come along, and then we see there’s really good value in this.”
O’Flanagan is measured but optimistic. “While we stand on a kind of momentous threshold when we’re looking at things like AI,” she says, “I think we always take hope and optimism from the fact that those unique voices and storytellers are always going to be something that the industry values.”
The audiovisual industry in Ireland is now valued at over €1 billion ($1.16 billion) in gross value added, supporting more than 15,800 full-time equivalent jobs. For Finnegan, the figures are meaningful only insofar as they reflect the health of the talent ecosystem they are built on.
“We’re a creative business, and the human experience is at the heart of creating work that connects with audiences,” she says. “Whatever the disruption might be — being that human experience, the artist being at the core of everything that we do — that is something that will just remain central to everything that we do.”
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