When the 2023 BAFTA nominations were unveiled on Jan. 19, one of the main talking points — alongside the standout success of All Quiet on the Western Front — was the domination of Ireland. 

The 10 nominations amassed by Martin McDonagh’s awards season favorite The Banshees of Inisherin included a clean sweep of the performance categories, with the film’s four main cast — Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson, Kerry Condon and Barry Keoghan — all finding slots. With Aftersun’s Paul Mescal and Good to You, Leo Grande’s Daryl McCormack (also a Rising Star nominee) joining Farrell on the leading actor shortlist, BAFTA CEO Jane Millichip noted on the day that half of the category was Irish (“Although it wasn’t one of our targets,” she told THR).

Away from the headlines, The Quiet Girl — the much-adored Irish-language drama — continued its remarkable rise, with not just a nomination for Film Not in the English Language, but one also for adapted screenplay for writer/director Colm Bairéad. Further down, An Irish Goodbye was nominated for British short film. 

At the Academy Museum in L.A. a week later, any suggestions that Ireland had benefited from (almost) home advantage were laid to rest — the supremacy continued. Banshees excelled again, with nine Oscar noms (including all four main performers), The Quiet Girl earned a spot in the international feature category (making history as the first Irish-language film to do so), An Irish Goodbye became the year’s only short to land an Oscar-BAFTA double, and Mescal was a shock — but very much celebrated — guest at the leading actor party (with many awards analysts suggesting his invite came at the expense of Tom Cruise for Top Gun: Maverick). Creative brains on social media claimed that Ireland had gone “Oscar Wild.”

But the country’s record haul of Academy nominations hasn’t been the only reason for cheer from Ireland’s screen industries over the last few months. On TV, Sharon Horgan’s darkly comic Apple TV+ show Bad Sisters — filmed mostly around Dublin and with a predominantly Irish cast — was one of the most talked about fall shows. Despite a murderous story that wrapped succinctly, it was quickly renewed for a second season. Then in Sundance, just two days before the Oscar nominations, the musical drama Flora and Son —the much-awaited next feature from Once and Sing Street writer/director John Carney and led by Bad Sisters breakout Eve Hewson — became an overnight sensation, sparking a bidding war (which Apple eventually won for more than $20 million) and firmly underling Hewson’s trajectory toward full-fledged stardom.

But what’s behind this dramatic moment that Ireland is enjoying? Given Banshees’ sizeable chunk of the nominations, is it merely a coincidence that McDonagh chose to make a film he described to THR as a “beautiful as any Irish film has been” around the same time Horgan began prepping her biggest TV project to date and Carney finally got to work on his next feature? Or has something else been going on?

“I think it’s a bit of both,” acknowledges Flora and Son producer Rebecca O’Flanagan of Treasure Entertainment, who suggests there was some “buoyed up energy” coming out of the pandemic that led to several projects being ready for public consumption around the same time. But there are most certainly other factors at play behind the scenes, with O’Flanagan pointing to the “prolonged and sustained investment” in the Irish industry, plus the essential support that came from local body Screen Ireland to keep companies like Treasure going during the crisis. “Without it, I just don’t think we’d have been able to get to the other side and have this content in place.”

O’Flanagan was five weeks into a 12-week shoot for the TV thriller series Smother when the first lockdown in 2020 hit and everything ground to a half, but says that Screen Ireland put in company support that allowed Treasure to continue developing its slate (which at the time included Flora and Son) “in the hope that we would come out the other side.” 

Support during an unexpected period of significant upheaval is one hugely important factor, but there’d already been a concerted effort to develop Irish-made productions and Irish IP. 

“We have at the moment, I think, about 90 projects at various stages of development,” notes Screen Ireland CEO Désirée Finnegan. “But the focus is really on giving time to talent to ensure that work is fully developed and allow for the pursuit of storytelling, to create the right environment for talent to have the creative freedom to take risks.”

While Banshees may be the bigger name, arguably the biggest noise from within the Irish industry from the awards nominations haul was for The Quiet Girl. After bowing in Berlin almost exactly a year ago, the drama — based on the novella Foster by Booker Prize-nominated author Claire Keegan and following a neglected 9-year-old (newcomer Catherine Clinch) sent to live with relatives on a farm — began building a spectacular momentum that hasn’t yet shown any signs of slowing down. On the way to its multiple BAFTA and Oscar nods, it dominated the local Irish film and TV awards (ahead of Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast) and smashed local box office records for an Irish-language feature. It’s now back in Irish cinemas again. 

The seeds for The Quiet Girl were sown by a scheme launched in 2017 called Cine4 and set up by Screen Ireland, broadcaster TG4 and the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland to develop and fund Irish-language feature films. 

“It was basically a concerted effort to try and get Irish language feature film off the ground,” says The Quiet Girl producer Cleona Ní Chrualaoí. Through Cine4, five applicants each year are given up to Euros 25,000 ($26,000) to develop projects, from which two are chosen to go into production with budgets of up to Euros 1.2 million ($1.3 million), and then given festival exposure and a theatrical release before being broadcast on TG4. The Quiet Girl was selected as one of the two winners in 2019. 

“Since that initiative was set up, there’s been a whole host of Irish language films now being produced here,” says Chrualaoí. “Before that, you could really count on one hand how many films have been made in the Irish language.”  Chrualaoí says there is now a “whole new wave” of features coming through thanks to Cine4.

Such schemes obviously weren’t necessary for a film like Banshees, which had the backing of Film4 before the deep pockets of Searchlight Pictures then came on board. But the film did take advantage of Ireland’s Section 481 tax relief, used by numerous film and TV productions over the years. With an eye on growing the ecosystem of behind-the-camera talent, since 2019 productions have had to provide opportunities for local skills development in order to qualify for the incentive,  “I think it’s one of the first in Europe to link the tax credit to skills development very specifically like this,” notes Finnegan, who says customized programs are developed for each production that can involve total new entrants to the industry but also more experienced crew looking to upskill. 

“It’s a huge opportunity to take the best-in-class experience that crew would get on these large international productions and then bring that back to something like The Quiet Girl and domestic Irish production and see them benefit.” Since launching in April 2019, almost 1,700 participants have been through this skills development program. 

Specifically looking at the TV side, Screen Ireland was actually born out of the former Irish Film Board in 2018, but with an expanded remit to include TV drama. From this new launch, investment has been made into developing Irish projects for the small screen (at Content London in December, 12 projects were represented), with various funding programs set up for writers and directors. In 2018, a new production fund was introduced, with the first project to come through needing little introduction: the acclaimed 2020 BBC/Hulu series Normal People. 

The sharp trajectory of the show’s lead star Mescal from TV debut to Academy Award nomination in under three years is one likely to be discussed in depth ahead of the Oscars ceremony on March 12. For O’Flanagan, alongside celebrating the newcomers like Mescal (now one of Hollywood’s most in-demand actors), she says she’s especially delighted for the best supporting actress nod for Banshees star Condon, someone who’s been an “extraordinary stage and screen actor over the last 20 years.”

While the producer understands that it may seem to outsiders like Irish stars such as Condon are now “exploding onto the scene,” to her it’s more like a “slow burn,” with some of Ireland’s very best, “who have been working to a very high standard for a very long time,” now being recognized on the international stage.  “And then there’s this brilliant new talent that just seems to be bursting through.” 

In an attempt to keep the new talent flowing, Screen Ireland recently partnered with Bow Street Academy and the National Screen Acting School of Ireland on a program called The Actor as Creative, which provides grants to 30 actors stars to put towards making short films. But before the first graduates of that scheme come through, Ireland’s next major star may well have been introduced in Sundance. In her review of Flora and Son, THR’s Caryn James said that Hewson — the daughter of U2 frontman Bono — managed to take a “flawed but good-hearted mess of a character and make her sympathetic, likable and fully human.” 

And like The Quiet Girl in 2022, there may well be unsuspecting breakouts from this year’s Berlinale. Among the Irish films screening is the animation A Greyhound of a Girl, adapted from beloved Irish novelist Roddy Doyle’s novel and with a stellar voice cast including both Sharon Horgan and Brendan Gleeson. 

Of course, before 2023’s record haul of nominations, it was Ireland’s thriving animation industry that was behind the country’s more regular trips to the Oscars, with nominations for The Secret of Kells (2009), Song of the Sea (2014), The Breadwinner (2017) and Wolfwalkers (2021), all out of the Kilkenny studio Cartoon Saloon. Many were surprised that the studio’s latest feature, My Father’s Dragon, wasn’t among the nominees this year.

O’Flanagan asserts that it’s the small, calculated, strategic steps that have paved the upward path to the grand stage where Ireland’s screen industries sit today. 

“These successful plans need time to work and need to be over five to 10 years of going, ‘If this is where we want to get, what are the investments we have to do?’ We’re not going to have immediate gratification,” she says. “I think the Irish language one is a really amazing example of that, a slow steady investment in the talent and nurturing of the talent and bringing them step-by-step to where we are, which is the pinnacle.”

Adds O’Flanagan: “I mean, you’re nowhere without the talent and the voices, obviously, but the talent and voices, to some extent, are nowhere as well without the opportunity and the support, especially when coming from a relatively small industry. But we do feel it tends to punch above its weight.”