Ireland Doesn't Trust Its Influencers. It Buys From Them Anyway.

Ten per cent.

That is the share of Irish consumers who told the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission they trust the information an influencer gives them. Not a slim majority. Not a third. One in ten — against 24 per cent for media reviews and 43 per cent for ordinary online reviews.

Here is the same research, four pages later. Of the Irish people who follow influencers, 66 per cent had bought something because an influencer mentioned it.

We do not believe them. We buy from them anyway. Everything else in this article is an attempt to explain that sentence.

First, what we are actually talking about

The word "influencer" has become almost useless. Ireland's advertising regulator uses it as an umbrella covering "influencers, content creators, online personalities, online streamers, bloggers/vloggers, celebrities, or media personalities" — and, in a line that tells you how strange this industry has become, explicitly includes human, virtual or animal personas.

Creators themselves mostly hate the word. They say "content creator." The trade and the taxman say "influencer." And a fourth category has arrived that is genuinely different: the UGC creator, hired to make content that the brand posts on its own channels, whose personal following is irrelevant because nobody will ever see their face attached to their own name. That distinction is now reshaping the whole market, and it has its own piece in this series.

Who Ireland is actually watching

There is no official register, and follower counts rot faster than fruit. But in October 2025 TikTok published an Irish shortlist for its UK & Ireland awards, sorted into categories, which is the closest thing to an industry-sanctioned snapshot we have. Twelve Irish creators were nominated. None of them won. Every category went elsewhere — Creator of the Year to Max Klymenko, Fashion & Beauty to Nikki Lilly, Food to Kieran Monlouis. It is a useful corrective to any notion that Irish creators dominate anything beyond Ireland.

Comedy and entertainment — a woman at the top

Miriam Mullins from Garryvoe, Co. Cork is the biggest domestic name in this report and the shortlist's only Creator of the Year nominee. She came home from Florida to her childhood bedroom at the start of the pandemic and started posting pranks and comedy. She had 1.6 million TikTok followers by late 2021 and 1.9 million by 2022; checking her profile as we wrote this, in August 2026, she is on 2.2 million. She has since done The Late Late Show, a Red FM radio slot and Dancing with the Stars.

The largest raw Irish following, though, belongs to a man most Irish adults have never heard of: Daithí De Nogla, from Limerick, via Los Angeles, with 7.45 million YouTube subscribers. He is also the only Irish creator in our research with anything resembling a staff.

The Gardiner Brothers, Michael and Matthew, hold more than 40 major Irish dancing titles between them, including five World Championships. They started posting seriously in 2020, were signed by the Andrea Roche agency that October — one of the cleanest documented examples of the pipeline from viral video to representation — and now sit on 4.1 million TikTok followers, more than any other account in this article.

Fashion and beauty — female-dominated, with one striking exception

Pippa O'Connor Ormond is the commercial benchmark. Her POCO business reported revenue of €7.75 million for the twelve months to 31 October 2025, up 117 per cent, with pre-tax profits of €1.17 million — tripled year on year, and a long way from the operating losses it was posting in 2022 and 2023. POCO Beauty launched in Selfridges in July 2025.

Suzanne Jackson built the template everyone else follows: blog in 2010, full-time in 2013, SoSu Cosmetics in 2016, Dripping Gold in 2018, then step back from the CEO role in 2022 and let the brand run without you.

And yet the single Irish creator TikTok shortlisted for Fashion & Beauty in 2025 was a man selling antique jewellery. Matthew Weldon — 215,600 followers and 6.4 million likes, with his shop's address in the bio — bought Courtville Antiques in Dublin in 2018 and started posting during the pandemic. On his fourth video — a convertible ruby and diamond tiara — he went viral, picked up national coverage, and began receiving enquiries from every continent. Tourists now put a small Dublin jewellery shop on the same day's itinerary as the Guinness Storehouse. He turned up to the awards wearing an 1840 Wicklow-gold brooch and made an argument for buying things "crafted to last long enough that they inherit stories."

Food — and the cleanest answer to the paid-or-not question

Cassie Stokes began in 2021 by reviewing Christmas sandwiches. That is the entire origin story. It grew into a nationwide tour of bakeries, cafés, restaurants and pubs, 338,000 Instagram followers as of May 2026, 138,300 on TikTok, an Irish launch campaign for Peroni, and a book.

Four lines into her TikTok bio, between the book plug and the enquiries address, sits this: "Not paid by restaurants or pubs." She has said elsewhere that she buys everything she reviews. Hold that thought — it becomes the sharpest line in this whole series.

Watch on TikTok — @cassiestokes1111

The format in one clip: a pub, an opinion, no client. Stokes built an audience of hundreds of thousands reviewing places nobody paid her to walk into.

James Kavanagh is the most complete arc in Irish creator history, partly because he started on the other side of the desk — in PR and youth marketing, working on Kerrygold and Barry's Tea. He broke through on Snapchat in 2015, co-founded the food company Currabinny with his partner William Murray in 2016, and won Cookbook of the Year at the 2018 An Post Irish Book Awards.

Sport — overwhelmingly male

This is the least balanced category by some distance. Jim Flanagan, 20, is the stadium PA voice for Leinster Rugby with close to half a million followers across TikTok and Instagram — 340,200 on TikTok alone — and named partnerships with Canterbury, Sports Direct, Adidas, Club Orange and KFC.

Behind the creators sits a quieter commercial machine. The Dublin agency Sport Endorse, founded in 2016, represents over 100 GAA players. Rates reported in 2021 — and they will have moved since — put Dean Rock at around €1,300 per sponsored Instagram post on 37,000 followers, Damien Comer at €665, and Tipperary's Orla O'Dwyer at €830 on 24,000. That last figure matters: women are commercially active here, they are simply less visible.

Farming — and the most quietly radical thing in this article

Katie Larkin, "The Abbey Cowgirl", documents daily life on her family's farm in Co. Galway. Her bio is five lines long and one of them is "Future vet." Farming in Ireland is not a female-dominated industry. The most visible farming creator being a young woman is, in itself, the story — and she knows exactly what she is doing:

"Lots of girls come up to me and they're farming at home with their parents or brothers and they look up to my content."

TikTok took a stand at the National Ploughing Championships and called it Tigh TikTok. Whatever else you think about the platform, that is a company that has correctly identified where Ireland actually lives.

Money — the anonymous start

Caroline Mooney started @irishbudgeting anonymously, "a way of keeping myself accountable," after her family moved to a single income. Within ten months she had over 110,000 Instagram followers on the back of energy-saving tips and a "five meals for €5" series. She began with no intention of being seen at all.

Watch on TikTok — @irishbudgeting

"Feeding 5 people for €5." A whole chicken, a bag of rice and a costing. This is the content that built the account — and it is worth noticing that its entire value to the viewer is spending less.

So why do people listen?

The honest answer has almost nothing to do with glamour and everything to do with proximity.

Miriam Mullins's first real brand partnership did not come from a media pack. She made a video about getting her smashed phone screen fixed at Pair Mobile. It did 147,000 views. The partnership followed the video, not the other way around. That is the actual mechanism: someone does an ordinary thing in a way that feels unperformed, enough people recognise themselves in it, and a brand notices afterwards.

It also explains the thing people find hardest to understand from outside — why anyone would be starstruck meeting a person who reviews sandwiches. You have not watched them; you have been talked to by them, in your kitchen, in your own time, usually alone. Television never had that. The relationship is one-directional and it feels reciprocal, which is a combination the human brain has no defence against.

And it is worth saying plainly: it is not costless for them. The Dublin makeup artist Elaine Cruz, who calls herself a "reluctant influencer", puts it starkly — "every time I post something on the internet I have to physically and mentally and emotionally prepare myself to be bullied and trolled." Melanie Murphy, 628,000 YouTube subscribers, describes four or five years without days off and losing the ability to distinguish work from life.

Who is actually taking the photographs?

Mostly, they are. This is one of the more persistent myths about the industry — that there is a professional crew behind the grid.

Murphy calls herself "a one-woman band" with an agent only for contracts. Nathalie Lennon describes doing the idea, the capture, the edit, the voiceover and the on-screen text herself. Mullins films her own content between brand calls and emails. The exception is De Nogla, at 7.45 million subscribers: "I have editors, a manager, an assistant, a thumbnail artist."

That is the real shape of it. A paid team is not a mid-career upgrade in Ireland — it arrives, if it arrives at all, at a scale almost nobody reaches.

But there is a professional layer above the phone, and it is badly under-reported. Terrie Burton, who trades as Noir Photique and has recently opened a studio she designed herself, is one of the people doing it. She met the singer Nathan Carter on an RSVP magazine shoot at Lough Eske and went on to build him a modelling portfolio — luxury cars, aeroplanes, castles — which produced an official calendar, an album cover and commercial brand partnerships. Her own tags on that job read: model, brand ambassador, fashion photographer, Irish. That is the entire pipeline in four words. She has also photographed the presenter and style broadcaster Darren Kennedy, and covered a distillery launch attended by Ryan Tubridy, Ronan Keating and Russell Crowe.

Her verdict on the world she is photographing, written on her own site, is worth more than most industry commentary: "not sure what celebrity even is, it's numbers on a screen and getting shouted at in the street from what I can gather."

What a paid post actually looks like

Most of the argument about influencers happens at a level of abstraction that helps nobody. So here are two, from creators in this article, both correctly labelled.

Watch on TikTok — @miriammullins_

Mullins for Coca-Cola. The caption opens with the word "AD" — first word, before anything else, which is exactly what the guidance asks for and what nearly half of Irish commercial posts do not do.

Watch on TikTok — @irishbudgeting

Mooney for Aldi, tagged #ALDIbrandambassador — the tier above a one-off post, and disclosed as such. A budgeting creator being paid by a supermarket is either a perfect fit or an obvious tension, depending on how generous you are feeling.

Now the same creator, unpaid, on a Sunday in July:

Watch on TikTok — @miriammullins_

"Saturated but worth it .. come on Cork." No brand, no label, no fee. This is the deposit; the Coca-Cola post is the withdrawal. The business only works if there is far more of the former than the latter.

Do they actually do any good?

Some of it is real and specific.

James Kavanagh campaigned actively to repeal the Eighth Amendment ahead of the 2018 referendum, and in 2016 his Snapchat interview with his young nephew about autism travelled far enough to be picked up internationally. Katie Larkin is doing something measurable for how young women see a career in agriculture. Caroline Mooney's entire output is helping people spend less money, which is an unusual business model for someone paid to make people spend money.

Set against that, the industry's own regulator has been busy. In February 2026 the CCPC issued compliance notices to Conor McGregor, over three 2024 posts promoting Forged Irish Stout without disclosing paid promotion, and to Suzanne Jackson, over four breaches promoting SOSU Cosmetics between December 2024 and February 2025. In December 2024 the advertising authority upheld a complaint that a Pippa O'Connor story featuring POCO Beauty products was not properly labelled as advertising; her side argued that her ownership of the brand was widely known and that restricting promotion on her own profile was potentially anti-competitive.

The bigger number is more damning than any individual case. When the CCPC studied 70 Irish influencers over a fortnight — more than 7,500 posts — it found that 48.4 per cent of commercial posts were not tagged in any way. Nearly half. And 24 per cent of the people who bought something on an influencer's say-so later felt misled.

The questions this raises, and where we go next

Three things do not sit comfortably together.

Cassie Stokes buys her own dinners. Meanwhile, between January 2025 and July 2026, Fáilte Ireland and Tourism Ireland paid creators more than €1 million of public money to promote Irish destinations — €250,797 and €771,114 respectively, with the highest-paid recipient taking €26,072 in 2025 alone. Both of those things are legitimate. They are not the same thing, and a reader scrolling past cannot always tell which one they are looking at.

Then there is the question nobody in the industry enjoys. Every published Irish campaign result we could find — and we looked at a lot of them — reports reach, views or engagement. Not one reports sales. Meanwhile 65.9 per cent of marketers expect their influencer spend to pay back within a month, and only a quarter of them track attributable revenue at all.

Is it worth it? Is it still, in the end, about who you know? We have spent a considerable amount of time on those questions, and they need more room than this piece has.

The rest of the series:

A note on the sourcing

The consumer trust and post-labelling figures are from the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission's influencer marketing research, covering a nationally representative survey of 1,000 people and an observational study of 70 Irish influencers across more than 7,500 posts. The TikTok Awards shortlist and results are as published by TikTok and reported by RTÉ. Company figures for POCO are from filed accounts as reported in Irish trade coverage. The advertising ruling concerning POCO Beauty and the CCPC compliance notices concerning Conor McGregor and Suzanne Jackson are as published by the regulators and reported by RTÉ and the Irish Examiner; in each case the subject's own response is included where one was given.

The photography details are from Terrie Burton's own published journal at Noir Photique, including the Nathan Carter portfolio shoot and the images captioned with Darren Kennedy's name. Follower counts carry the date we found them, because they move constantly: TikTok figures for Mullins, the Gardiner Brothers, Weldon, Flanagan, Stokes and Larkin were read from their live profiles in August 2026. GAA sponsorship rates are from 2021 reporting and should be read as historic. State tourism payments are as released by Fáilte Ireland and Tourism Ireland covering January 2025 to July 2026. The graphics are our own, built from the figures cited above. Quotations are as published in the interviews cited and have not been abridged in a way that changes their meaning.