Mr. Singleton was among the Trinity faculty and staff members who worked in the college’s previous acting program, which mixed academic work and training classes. He and others said that program lacked a clear identity (it was neither a stand-alone school nor a conservatory) and sufficient financing. It closed in 2007, and Mr. Singleton took a lead role in consulting with Irish theater industry leaders about their idealized vision of a dramatics academy. He also spoke with officials at RADA, who were speaking separately with their former student, Ms. Ryan, about her desire to develop a theater school at her father’s behest.

Ms. Ryan declined to disclose the specific amount of money provided to the Lir from the Cathal Ryan Trust, but she said that her father had earmarked 35 million euros (about $50 million) to support arts in Ireland and children’s services abroad. This year Ms. Ryan and the trust announced a $14 million donation to Unicef to support children’s health and education programs in Sri Lanka; as a point of comparison, she said in an interview that the trust’s financial contribution to the Lir was smaller at this time. (Ms. Ryan is on the board of the Lir, which also includes Michael Colgan, the longtime artistic director of the Gate Theater here, and Dermot McCrum, a prominent Irish communications entrepreneur.)

“Ireland doesn’t have the strong level of public-private partnerships as U.S. universities with their private donors,” Ms. Ryan said, “but the money from the Ryan trust and the government university system is enough to start building a serious school that, we believe, will become the equal of great acting schools.”

The Lir does face some local competition in the short term, however. For 25 years Dublin has had an independent drama school, the Gaiety School of Acting, founded by the actor and director Joe Dowling, who is now the artistic director of the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. Unlike the Lir, the Gaiety is not a formal part of Ireland’s higher education system and does not award formal degrees validated by a university; rather, many of its students take an acting course here and there or enroll in a certificate program.

Irish students at the Gaiety must also pay fees for classes, as they do at acting schools in London and New York. The Lir, by contrast, is part of Ireland’s heavily subsidized system of higher education, and its Irish students will pay only a small fraction of the cost of their education to attend the Lir, about 1,500 euros a year ($2,200). (Irish students will also pay far less to attend the Lir than to go to RADA or other overseas schools.)

Patrick Sutton, the director of the Gaiety, said that his school had begun taking steps to associate itself with Irish universities before the Lir came on the scene; he said a partnership on some coursework would begin soon with the National University of Ireland in Maynooth, outside Dublin. While Mr. Sutton said that the Gaiety “welcomes the Lir and sees it as an important development in Irish theater,” he took strong exception to Ms. Ryan’s view and that of others that until now Dublin had lacked a prestigious acting school.