Clinical trials sound technical, but they boil down to one thing: giving Irish patients earlier access to new treatments while keeping skilled jobs at home. The latest figures show that access is genuinely growing, and the state's research funder has just set out a five-year plan to speed it up further.
Trial numbers are climbing year on year
The industry data shows real momentum. A total of 165 pharmaceutical industry-sponsored clinical trials started in Ireland between 2023 and 2025, according to the IPHA Clinical Trials Activity Comparison Report published in March 2026. New trials rose from 41 in 2023 to 51 in 2024, a 24% increase, then to 73 in 2025, a further 44% jump.
That's a genuine growth trend, even if Ireland is still building from a smaller base than some neighbours: the same IPHA report places it 14th of 27 EU countries per capita for industry-sponsored trials in 2025, with Belgium and Denmark leading in Europe. The direction of travel is what matters for the story of 2025-2026, and it is clearly upward.
Oncology remains the single biggest area of Irish clinical research, accounting for 48% of all industry-sponsored trials, the IPHA report found, reflecting both the scale of cancer treatment need and Ireland's established cancer trials infrastructure. IPHA has also flagged that just 1.5% of cancer patients were enrolled in interventional clinical trials in 2023, well short of the 6% target set out in the National Cancer Strategy, one of the clearest signs that growing trial numbers still need to translate into more patients actually taking part, not just more trials being registered.
The Health Research Board (HRB), Ireland's state health research funder, is targeting this growth directly. Marking Clinical Trials Day in May 2026, the HRB said clinical research is 'a cornerstone' of its newly launched five-year strategy, and that Ireland has 'a strong foundation in clinical research, with a distributed network of clinical research facilities, excellent academic investigators and globally competitive life sciences and medtech industries,' per its published strategy documents, a rare moment of a state agency stating its ambition in plain, checkable terms.
IPHA has also pointed to a specific bottleneck once a trial is approved: Ireland ranked as the slowest of all EU member states for the time between EU Clinical Trial Regulation approval and a study site actually being ready to recruit patients, at an average of 213 days for trials started between 2023 and 2025, according to its March 2026 report. Closing that gap between approval and a genuinely open site is exactly what the new national strategy and funding reforms are designed to do.
A new national strategy to speed things up
In May 2026, the HRB launched Bringing Research to Life, its Strategy 2026-2030, at an event attended by Minister for Health Jennifer Carroll MacNeill. Marking 40 years of the HRB, the strategy sets out a plan to grow both investigator-led and commercial clinical trials, alongside real-world evidence studies, across every part of the health system, according to the HRB's press release.
A specific goal is to work with the Department of Health and other agencies through the Clinical Trials Advisory Council to co-invest in a coordinated national network of trials delivery units, increasing both the number of trials on offer and the number of people able to access them, the HRB's strategy document states. It also commits to a new national portal and dashboard for clinical trial metrics, so performance can be tracked publicly for the first time in a systematic way.
Minister Carroll MacNeill described the strategy launch as recognising that 'health research is about people. It is about finding better ways to prevent illness, diagnose disease, deliver treatment and support recovery,' according to the HRB's press release. Her presence signals this is being treated as a joint government and research-sector priority, not an agency-only initiative.
Ireland is also taking part in FAST-EU, a joint pilot run by European medicines regulators, ethics committee networks and the HPRA, which began in January 2026 and aims to authorise complex, multi-country clinical trials within a maximum of 70 days from submission, including sponsor response time, by running validation and ethical assessment in parallel rather than one after another. If it works as intended, that pan-European speed-up should help fix exactly the slow start-up times IPHA has flagged as Ireland's weakest point.
New funding routes are already flowing to researchers
Behind the strategy, the funding pipeline is already active. The HRB's Investigator-Led Clinical Trials (ILCT) Programme 2025, launched in February 2025, offers up to €430,000 for feasibility studies and up to €1.3 million for full definitive intervention trials, run across three assessment cycles through to late 2026, according to HRB guidance documents. Ireland's seven university-based Clinical Research Facilities and Centres provide the infrastructure, specialist staff and governance that let these trials run to international standards.
The HRB has also kept investing in the practical building blocks of trial delivery, including ongoing support for the National Research Ethics Committees to streamline approvals, which the HRB says is central to making Ireland a faster, more trusted place to run a trial.
Primary care research is growing too. The HRB Primary Care Clinical Trials Network Ireland, founded in 2015, has now supported principal investigators in more than 35 successful grant applications, securing over €25 million for Irish research delivered through GP practices and primary care centres, according to the network's own figures, extending trial access beyond hospital settings and into everyday general practice, an important shift given how much routine treatment in Ireland happens outside hospital walls altogether.
Turning research into patient benefit and jobs
None of this is abstract. Clinical trials give patients access to new treatments, sometimes years before they'd otherwise be available, while trial infrastructure supports Ireland's globally significant life sciences and medtech sectors, which the HRB explicitly names as one of the foundations its strategy builds on, alongside the universities and hospitals that actually host the studies.
A defining feature of the new HRB strategy is public and patient involvement, ensuring patients and communities help shape how research is designed and delivered throughout its full life cycle, the HRB said in its May 2026 launch release, describing this as an area it pioneered in Ireland. That focus on inclusion is meant to widen who gets to take part in trials, not just how many trials exist.
There's more to do, and the HRB itself has been candid that Ireland ranks in the lower half of EU states for trial participation per capita, which is precisely why it's made this a five-year strategic goal rather than a one-off initiative. But with trial numbers up 44% in a single year and a funded, government-backed plan now in motion, the trajectory for Irish patients and researchers alike is a positive one.
IPHA's comparison with Denmark is a useful check on how far there is still to travel: a country of similar population and wealth ran two-and-a-half times as many industry-sponsored trials as Ireland over the same three-year period, 425 compared with 157. That gap is exactly what the HRB strategy, the FAST-EU pilot and the ILCT funding rounds are aimed at closing, and it gives a clear, publicly stated benchmark against which future progress can be measured rather than vague ambition.
The Bottom Line
Ireland is not yet a European leader in clinical trials, but it's growing fast from a strengthening base: 73 new industry trials in 2025 alone, a dedicated new HRB strategy backed by the Minister for Health, active funding rounds for researchers, and a primary care trials network already worth over €25 million. For patients, that means more chances to access new treatments closer to home; for Ireland's life sciences sector, a stronger case for future investment.
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