The Top 18 Irish Creators, Ranked on What Can Actually Be Proved

Every ranking of Irish creators you have ever read was a list of follower counts in a trench coat.

We wanted to do it differently, so we started by doing the boring thing. On the morning this was published we opened every profile and read the number off it ourselves, rather than repeating a figure a magazine printed in 2022. Then we tried to establish what each of these people has actually built — filed accounts, named brand deals, awards from bodies with names, work that exists off the platform.

Two thirds of it did not survive.

First, a fair question: can we not just look at their analytics?

There is a widespread belief that Instagram now lets creators publish their own performance figures — reach, engagement, growth — on their profile, for anyone to inspect. If that were true, this article would have been a great deal easier to write.

It is not true, and the detail of why is worth having.

What Meta actually built is the Instagram Creator Marketplace, launched invite-only in the United States in July 2022 and expanded in February 2024. Creators opt in; brands browse them from inside Meta Business Suite, filtering by creator and audience attributes and viewing portfolios and insights. More than five million Instagram creators were discoverable there by June 2026. None of it is visible to you.

In June 2024 the trade press spotted a test of something closer to the thing people imagine: a “Creator Insights” link on selected creators’ profiles, showing follower growth, accounts reached and accounts engaged over the previous 30 days. Even that was “seemingly only viewable by brand accounts”. Instagram never announced it, we could find no Meta page naming it, and no reporting that it ever left testing. A further feature reported in September 2025 — downloadable performance summaries a creator can hand to a prospective partner — is a media kit with better manners, not a public record.

TikTok is the same story. Its Creator Marketplace has shown analytics to brands since March 2020 — views, engagements, engagement rate, audience breakdown — and none of it appears on a public profile.

So, to answer the question directly: none of the eighteen creators in this ranking is publishing their analytics, because no Instagram or TikTok feature currently lets them. The data exists. It is shown to the people buying, and to nobody else.

Why Meta built it that way

Meta has been consistent about the reason, and the reason is not transparency. In 2022 Instagram told TechCrunch the marketplace was part of “our commitment to make Instagram the best place for creators to make a living doing what they love — all while helping brands discover creators to partner with.” In February 2024 Meta put it more plainly: “Brands have told us it can be challenging to source creators for partnership ads.”

The competitive context matters too. In August 2024 Digiday reported that TikTok and Snap were courting influencer agencies with access to first-party data and custom analytics, explicitly to take social advertising spend off Meta. These tools are a sales channel. Nothing in Meta’s own material frames them as a check against inflated numbers.

So can you trust a creator’s own figures?

Cautiously — and this is precisely why we did not accept anybody’s.

A 2019 University of Baltimore study for CHEQ estimated that influencer fraud would cost advertisers $1.3 billion that year, roughly 15 per cent of the market. It is seven years old and we flag it as such. In 2021 HypeAuditor reported that 55 per cent of Instagram influencers had engaged in some form of fraud during 2020, and that 45 per cent of Instagram accounts were fake — a striking finding from a company that sells fraud detection, which is worth holding in mind while you read it.

What nobody has produced is research on falsified screenshots or invented media kits specifically. The available studies measure fake followers, not doctored documents. Which leaves us where we started: the only figures anyone outside the deal can check are the ones on the public profile. So those are the ones we checked.

Six of the twenty-two people we built a file on have no follower figure published in any dated, citable source. Not a stale one. None. Several of them are on national award shortlists. One of them announces to 82,300 people at Croke Park.

So here is our ranking, and here is the method, because a ranking without one is just an opinion with numbers stuck to it. We weighted four things: reach, commercial proof you can look up, recognition from somebody other than themselves, and durability — whether anything survives if the algorithm turns. Reach counted least. You will see why.

The number everyone leads with

Four Irish TikTok accounts are above two million. The fifth-biggest is on 340,000. There is no middle in Irish social media — there is a summit and there is everybody else, and the gap between fourth and fifth place is a factor of six.

That shape matters, because it means the follower number stops telling you anything useful almost immediately. Below the top four it is measuring noise.

Divide lifetime likes by current followers and the order rearranges completely. Jim Flanagan has one twelfth of the Gardiner Brothers' audience and six times their likes per follower. It is a crude measure — likes accumulate, so older accounts are flattered — but it asks the right question. Not how many people follow this, but how hard does that audience work.

Right. The eighteen.

1. Suzanne Jackson

Skerries, Co. Dublin · beauty · 296,000 Instagram

Top of a creator ranking, and her follower count is not in the top ten. That is the entire argument of this article in one entry.

Jackson’s Instagram stood at 284,000 when the Irish Examiner reported her company accounts in October 2020. It reads 296,000 today. Six years, twelve thousand followers. In the same window, SanFran Cosmetics — trading as SOSUbySJ and owned fifty-fifty with Fran O’Gorman — posted a 2019 profit of €3.039m against €902,760 the year before, and by 2020 had accumulated profits of €5.9m. Cohar Ltd made €2.12m in 2020. She has been distributed through Dunnes, Tesco, Primark, Boohoo and Beauty Bay, stepped down as chief executive in July 2022, and came back in October 2023.

She is not a big account. She is a manufacturer with an audience attached, which is a completely different and considerably more durable thing.

The other side of the ledger: in February 2026 the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission issued her a compliance notice over undisclosed paid promotion of Sosu Cosmetics across four Instagram posts between December 2024 and February 2025, as part of a tranche of 18 enforcement cases. No response from her was recorded in the reporting.

2. Pippa O’Connor Ormond

Co. Kildare · beauty and denim · 442,000 Instagram

The best set of numbers filed by anyone in this ranking, and they are recent. BOPOC Holdings, which operates POCO Beauty, reported revenue of €7.75m for the twelve months to end October 2025, up 117 per cent. Operating profit €1.62m, a fifteen-fold increase. Pre-tax profit €1.17m, tripled. Fifteen people employed. POCO Beauty went into Selfridges in July 2025.

Now the part that gets left out. The same company posted operating losses of €626,747 in 2022 and €1.04m in 2023. This is not a story about a following converting effortlessly into money. It is a story about two loss-making years and €452,548 of interest payments before it turned.

3. Miriam Mullins

Garryvoe, Co. Cork · comedy · 2.2m TikTok

The biggest domestic name in Ireland, and the only Irish creator shortlisted for Creator of the Year at the TikTok Awards UK & Ireland 2025. She did not win — that went to Max Klymenko — which is a useful corrective to any idea that Irish creators dominate anything beyond Ireland.

She came home from Boca Raton at the start of the pandemic and started posting from her childhood bedroom. The breakout was a video about getting her phone screen fixed at a Cork repair shop; it did 147,000 views and the brand partnership followed it. That is the actual mechanism, and it runs the opposite way to how most people assume.

Since: Red FM, Dancing with the Stars, and the Under the Influencer podcast with Lauren Whelan from June 2024. Her line on the industry she works in is the sharpest thing any Irish creator has said on the record about it:

“90% of influencers have something done. When we go to events, a lot of people look the same. Natural beauty isn’t a thing anymore.”

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 still do not do.

4. The Gardiner Brothers

Clarinbridge, Co. Galway · dance · 4.1m TikTok

The largest Irish audience on TikTok, and the one built on the most unlikely foundation: competitive Irish dancing. Michael and Matthew hold world titles — Matthew scored a perfect 700 out of 700 in Montreal in 2015, and that year they became the first brothers to win world titles in the same year in nearly forty years.

Their first video went up in 2012, to Smooth Criminal. They signed to the Andrea Roche agency in October 2020, danced principal roles in Riverdance, and now run their own show. Their nominated video for the 2025 TikTok Awards — Irish dance to Doechii’s Anxiety — did 68.7 million views and 6.7 million likes. It was Highly Commended, which is the polite way of saying second.

One caution we will state rather than hide: their brand list — Aer Lingus, Emirates, Waterford, The Jockey Club, Microsoft — is published on their own website and we could not independently confirm any single entry.

5. Garron Noone

Ballina, Co. Mayo · comedy · 2.5m TikTok

He spent 2020 posting music production tutorials. He switched to comedy in early 2023 and went from thousands of followers to over a million by February 2024. He has played the 3Olympia, joined Robbie Williams on stage at Croke Park in August 2025, and teaches music production on a UK master’s course.

In March 2025 he posted a video about immigration in which he said there “absolutely is an immigration issue in Ireland” and that “our towns and especially our cities are becoming much less safe.” He deactivated his accounts for several days. On his return he said he was “not anti-immigrant”, accepted his points had been too vague and open to misinterpretation, said far-right accounts had misappropriated the video, and added: “I absolutely should be held accountable for that.”

We include the episode because a ranking that only counts the good weeks is a press release. He is fifth because the audience is real, the touring is real, and the accountability was stated in his own words rather than through a manager.

6. Cassie Stokes

Dundrum, Dublin · food · 138,300 TikTok, 338,000 Instagram

She started in 2021 by testing Christmas sandwiches in Dublin. In February 2026 she was named to TikTok’s global Discover List — fifty creators to watch worldwide — as the only Irish creator on it. She won Foodie InstaStar at the Stellar awards in September 2024 and was Highly Commended for Food Creator of the Year at the TikTok Awards in 2025. Her book, Best of Ireland, is out from DK on 27 October 2026 with more than 500 recommendations across all 32 counties. Peroni built its “ONLY Peroni” Irish launch around her.

And four lines into her TikTok bio, between the book plug and the enquiries address, sits the most quietly radical sentence in Irish social media: “Not paid by restaurants or pubs.”

Watch on TikTok — @cassiestokes1111

The format in one clip: a pub, an opinion, no client.

7. Daithí De Nogla

Co. Limerick · gaming · 7.41m YouTube subscribers as listed

The biggest Irish creator business almost nobody in Irish media writes about, because it is gaming and it is on YouTube and it does not go to launches.

DDN Direct Ltd went from accumulated profits of €860,244 in 2016 to €1.5m in 2017 to €3.22m by the 2022 accounts, with four staff and €255,808 paid to directors. He hit a million subscribers in 2014 while still a student and dropped out of IT Tralee to do it full time. No accounts have been reported since 2022, so treat anything more recent as unknown.

“The business is ever evolving. It is a case or ‘adapt or die’. I am very blessed and I am really happy. I am 12 years at this, but I feel I am on an upward trajectory.”

8. Vogue Williams

Portmarnock, Dublin · broadcasting · 1m Instagram

The hardest number in this entire ranking is hers, and it has nothing to do with social media. Five sold-out 3Arena shows of My Therapist Ghosted Me between November 2023 and November 2024 grossed €2.36m in front of 39,873 people.

Howth Media Ltd held €3.75m in cash at the end of July 2024, up 148 per cent, and paid her a £539,015 dividend. She is more broadcaster-with-an-audience than social-native creator, which is precisely why she is here: she is the clearest example of a following being used as a distribution system for something that makes money elsewhere.

She also brought the UK agency Matchstick to Ireland, which means she is on both sides of the table — a fact worth holding on to if you read our piece on the agencies.

9. Tadhg and Derry Fleming

Ballymacelligott, Co. Kerry · comedy · 3.1m TikTok

Nine years on, the bat video is still the best thing that has ever happened on Irish social media. September 2017, a bat in the kitchen, Derry armed with a tea towel, Tadhg filming and roaring “Catch him Derry!” — a million views within days, then The Late Late Show, Jimmy Kimmel and the BBC.

Tadhg was a social media manager at the time. His verdict remains unimprovable:

“I’d say I put Ballymacelligott on the map.”

Their Aldi work is one of the very few brand partnerships in our entire file evidenced by an actual disclosed advertisement rather than an agency’s claim about itself.

10. Jim Flanagan

Kildare · sport · 340,200 TikTok, 76,000 Instagram

Forty-seven million likes on 340,000 followers. Nobody else in Irish social media is close.

He is stadium announcer for every Leinster Rugby home game, including Leinster against Munster at Croke Park in front of 82,300 — a record attendance for club rugby in Ireland. He graduated from Maynooth in 2025 and made the Sport for Business / PwC 30 Under 30 the same year, and was shortlisted for Sport Creator of the Year at the TikTok Awards.

He is tenth rather than higher for an honest reason: almost everything published about his commercial work traces back to his own agency’s roster page. Adidas is the only brand with a second, independent source. When the sales document is the only document, we say so.

11. Matthew Weldon

Dublin · antique jewellery · 215,600 TikTok

A chartered accountant who trained at KPMG, worked at Digicel in Jamaica, did gemmology training with the GIA, and whose great-grandfather was in the antique jewellery trade in the 1890s. He took over Courtville Antiques in Powerscourt Townhouse Centre in March 2018 and started posting out of necessity when a leveraged retail business was closed by lockdown.

On his fourth video — a convertible ruby and diamond tiara — he went viral. He was the single Irish creator shortlisted for Fashion and Beauty Creator of the Year at the 2025 TikTok Awards, and he was shortlisted for selling antique jewellery from a shop floor.

“Sometimes the medium of the message is as important as the message.”

12. Keilidh Cashell

Co. Monaghan · beauty · 503,000 Instagram

She founded Kash Beauty in 2020 and carries one of the largest followings of any Irish beauty creator. We are placing her twelfth with an explicit caveat: the widely quoted figure of 2.8m TikTok followers comes from the Irish Times in August 2022, and we could not re-verify a personal TikTok account against it. Her Instagram reads 503,000 today. We would rather rank her cautiously on a number we checked than confidently on one we did not.

“I think you have to be smart about it, and set it up in a way that if it was all to close down tomorrow, would I still be okay?”

Which is, for our money, the single most professional sentence any Irish creator has said out loud.

13. Serena Terry

Derry · comedy · 516,000 Instagram

Mammy Banter started in 2020 when her daughter showed her TikTok, and became a series in 2021 — while she was working sixty-hour weeks as a tech company’s chief operating officer. Two books with HarperCollins followed, plus a cameo as an RUC officer in Derry Girls and her own digital marketing consultancy.

A note on our own rule: we have taken “Irish” here to mean the island, which is why Derry and Tyrone are in this list. Reasonable people draw that line elsewhere.

14. James Kavanagh

Churchtown, Dublin · food · 54,600 TikTok

The lowest follower count in the top fifteen, and one of the strongest cases for durability in the whole ranking.

He came up through Snapchat from May 2015, having worked at the Dublin agency Thinkhouse from the age of 22 — so he arrived understanding the commercial machinery from the inside, which almost nobody else here did. He co-founded Currabinny with William Murray in February 2016, wrote a column for the Irish Examiner, and The Currabinny Cookbook won EUROSPAR Cookbook of the Year at the An Post Irish Book Awards in November 2018.

Eleven years in, with a following most agencies would call mid-tier, he has a food brand, a book award and a column. That is what the exit looks like.

15. Caroline Mooney

@irishbudgeting · money · 84,500 TikTok, 265,000+ Instagram

She started the page anonymously to hold herself accountable after her family moved to a single income, having taken maternity leave from a job as a gym manager and found she could not go back because of childcare costs. The content is cash stuffing, meal planning, and feeding a family of five for €5.

In June 2026 the Department of Finance invited her, along with three other finance creators, to a roundtable with Minister Simon Harris and Minister of State Robert Troy on Ireland’s forthcoming saving and investment scheme. The invitation went out on 12 June.

Read that twice. A woman who started an anonymous budgeting account four years ago is now in the room when the State briefs on savings policy. Whatever else this industry is, that is a genuine transfer of authority.

16. Seán Burke

Swords, Dublin · comedy · 125,600 TikTok

The most efficient account in this ranking: 125,600 followers off 209 videos. Everyone else here is in the hundreds or thousands. He is a working stand-up who moved to London, had a full-time job writing comedy sketches for Dream Team FC within two years, and now co-fronts The Stand Up Road Trip for Tourism Ireland and Channel 4, writes for Oliver Callan, and tours a live show.

“Stage time is so much more important than people realise. Even if the jokes are good, if you look nervous, people can tell if you aren’t believing in yourself.”

17. Katie Larkin

near Loughrea, Co. Galway · farming · 55,400 TikTok

The Abbey Cowgirl films daily life on her family’s Simmental farm in east Galway. She has a dairy business degree from UCD and in October 2025 began a five-and-a-half-year veterinary degree in Warsaw, which she intends to document.

Farming in Ireland is not a female-dominated industry. The most visible farming creator in the country being a young woman is, by itself, the story — and she knows exactly what she is doing with it:

“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.”

18. Caolán Ward

Donaghpatrick, Co. Meath · GAA · 68,800 TikTok

He started around September 2024 with a spontaneous video of chipping a football into a bucket in his garden. Within about a year he was shortlisted for Sport Creator of the Year at the TikTok Awards UK & Ireland, on a following of under seventy thousand, and hosting a stall with TikTok at the National Ploughing Championships.

He is last on this list and he has the third-highest likes-per-follower ratio on it. Both of those facts are the point.

Who is not here, and why

Several very large names came out on the checking.

Rosie Connolly has a real business in 4TH ARQ and a genuinely significant place in Irish advertising history — the ASAI upheld a complaint about a filtered Rimmel foundation post in June 2018, with Rimmel Ireland acknowledging an in-built camera filter had been used and committing to require disclosure in future. But we could find no dated follower figure from any citable source, and the turnover figures circulating for 4TH ARQ come from gossip sites rather than filings. Doireann Garrihy and Darren Kennedy are the same problem from the other direction: substantial careers, IMRO and VIP Style Awards between them, and not one verifiable audience number.

The Godfrey Twins are clearly active and clearly popular, and we could not evidence a single follower count, brand deal, award or dated quote. Roz Purcell and Charleen Murphy — the latter won InstaStar of the Year at the Stellar awards in September 2024 — both deserve files of their own, and neither had one built in time. That is our failing, not theirs.

The uncomfortable conclusion

Put the follower chart and the filings side by side and a pattern appears that nobody in this industry benefits from saying out loud.

The people at the top of the follower chart are mostly not the people at the top of the money chart. Suzanne Jackson and Pippa O’Connor Ormond have filed accounts running into millions and audiences that would not make the top four. Daithí De Nogla has more subscribers than anyone in Ireland and, as far as Irish media is concerned, does not exist. Jim Flanagan generates more affection per follower than anyone we measured and his commercial record is documented almost entirely by the agency that sells him.

Meanwhile brands are still buying by follower count, because it is the one number that is easy to get and impossible to argue with — and the numbers that would settle the argument sit inside a marketplace only the buyers can see.

And nobody knows how big any of this is

Irish digital advertising was measured at €1.146 billion in 2025, €576 million of it social. The study that counts it has no line for influencer or creator marketing. Neither has Core, the country’s largest media buyer, which forecasts six media and does not treat this as one of them. Neither does the Central Statistics Office. The one Ireland-specific figure that exists anywhere — €69 million — is a market-research firm’s model, built from third-party databases rather than from counting anything here, and the current version of it sits behind a paywall.

The hardest Irish number we could find is that Fáilte Ireland and Tourism Ireland together paid creators more than €1 million of public money in the eighteen months to July 2026, released under Freedom of Information. That tells you what two state agencies spent. It tells you nothing about the market.

So: an industry that Irish digital advertising named among its leading growth drivers for 2026 does not have a single euro figure to its name. Which is the same problem as the follower counts, one storey up.

If there is a single lesson in eighteen entries, it is the one Keilidh Cashell put better than any of us: set it up so that if it all closed down tomorrow, you would still be okay. Nine of the eighteen people on this list have done that. The other nine are one algorithm change away from finding out.

A note on the sourcing

Follower counts described as live were read by us directly from each public TikTok or Instagram profile on 24 August 2026 and will already have moved. Where we could not verify a live figure — Pippa O’Connor Ormond, Keilidh Cashell’s TikTok, Daithí De Nogla, Caroline Mooney’s Instagram — we have used the most recent published figure and said where it came from. The Instagram Creator Marketplace launch and expansion are as announced by Meta and reported by TechCrunch; the 2024 “Creator Insights” profile test and the 2025 shareable performance summaries were reported by Social Media Today and were never announced by Meta, which is why we have described them as tests rather than products. TikTok’s Creator Marketplace analytics date from March 2020 as reported by the same publication. The competitive context is from Digiday, August 2024. The fraud estimate is from a 2019 University of Baltimore study for CHEQ and is presented with its date; the 2021 figures are HypeAuditor’s, reported by Campaign, and we have flagged that HypeAuditor sells fraud detection. Company figures are filed accounts as reported in the Irish press: SanFran Cosmetics, Cohar and SoSueMe via the Irish Examiner and BreakingNews.ie; BOPOC Holdings via TheJournal.ie; DDN Direct via the Irish Examiner, RTÉ and the Limerick Post; Howth Media via the Irish Examiner. Award results are as published by the awarding bodies — TikTok’s own newsroom for the 2025 UK & Ireland awards and the 2026 Discover List, Stellar for the InstaStar awards, the An Post Irish Book Awards, Sport for Business for the PwC 30 Under 30, and RadioToday for the IMRO awards. The CCPC compliance notice concerning Suzanne Jackson and the 2018 ASAI ruling concerning Rosie Connolly are as published and reported, with the subject’s own response included in each case. Garron Noone’s March 2025 remarks and his response to them are quoted from the Irish Times. Brand partnerships are marked as evidenced only where a named brand was confirmed independently or by a disclosed advertisement; agency roster claims are identified as such. The Gardiner Brothers’ brand list and their follower figures after 2021 are self-published on their own website and we have said so rather than launder them. Irish digital advertising totals are the IAB Ireland Online Adspend Study for 2025, conducted by IRM, which contains no influencer or creator category; Core’s media forecasts are its published OUTLOOK reports; the €69 million Irish influencer figure is Statista’s modelled forecast and is a model rather than a measurement, which is why we have described it as one; the state tourism payments were released under Freedom of Information and reported in August 2026. The five graphics in this article are our own, built from the figures given in and around them. The cover photograph is used under the Unsplash Licence, by Agus Monteleone.