Lights, camera, tax credit as Revenue pays out €104m for various films and TV productions

The Irish production firm behind Jamie Dornan’s The Tourist TV thriller series secured corporation tax credits between €5 million and €10 million from Revenue, new figures show.

The Irish producers of The Tourist Series 2, Metropolitan Films International Ltd, received the sum in July of this year. Series two features Dornan reprising his role as an amnesia-afflicted car crash victim struggling to piece together his past and Series one of the global TV hit has already featured on RTÉ and BBC.

Filming on Series two commenced in Dublin in April this year.

The quarterly Revenue figures also show a movie adaptation of acclaimed novelist Claire Keegan’s best-seller Small Things Like These, starring Oscar-tipped best actor nominee Cillian Murphy, received between €2 million and €5 million in movie tax credits.

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The movie – set in an Irish town at Christmas 1985 – is to also star Ciarán Hinds and Emily Watson.

[ Emily Watson: ‘It’s easy to be proud to be Irish. It’s not so easy to be proud to be English’ ]

A spokeswoman for Revenue said on Monday that payments made under Section 481 of the Tax Consolidation Act to movie and TV production companies for the first nine months of this year total €104 million.

The payout represents a 34 per cent increase on the €77.5 million paid out for the corresponding nine months of last year.

The spokeswoman explained that the totals comprise a mixture of first instalments of claims and final balancing claims made on completion, and relate to projects certified over multiple years.

The figures also show that Keeper Pictures Ltd – formerly Blinder Films Ltd – received between €500,000 and €1 million in tax credits for Bono & The Edge: A Sort of Homecoming in August of this year.

Shinawil Ltd, making another production featuring Jamie Dornan called Borderline, received credits of between €2 million and €5 million last month. Dornan plays an IRA operative sent to London in the mid-1970s.

Last week as part of Budget 2024, the Government announced an expansion of the Sector 481 tax credit scheme.

Currently, the Section 481 credit offers a 32 per cent corporation tax credit on qualifying expenditure for films or television productions made in Ireland, up to a limit of €70 million per project. That cap has been raised to €125 million.