Airmid Éireann, Ireland's open pharma data project, released version 1.3 on 20 October 2026, adding eight datasets on the Irish health system, from national health accounts and hospital discharges to parliamentary questions on medicines. The free collection now holds 46 datasets and 1,247,825 records from 27 official publishers, each checked against its publisher's reuse terms.
- Release: version 1.3.0, 20 October 2026, archived on Zenodo as 10.5281/zenodo.23499798.
- Size: 46 datasets and 1,247,825 records from 27 official publishers, up from 38 datasets and 989,145 records in the previous weekly release.
- New: eight datasets on Ireland and Northern Ireland, covering health spending, hospital activity, prescribing, public tenders, research grants, plant emissions and parliamentary questions.
- Licences: every one of the 46 datasets was checked against its publisher's own terms before release.
- Cost: free, with no account or key, as CSV and JSON files.
What is new in Airmid Éireann version 1.3
The eight new datasets come from Irish, Northern Irish and EU public bodies, and all are published under open licences that allow reuse with credit. Together they add 258,680 records to the collection.
| Dataset | Publisher | Records |
|---|---|---|
| Hospital discharges by diagnosis, procedure, age, sex and county (HIPE summary tables) | Department of Health and HSE | 111,352 |
| Northern Ireland GP prescribing, monthly, latest 36 months | Business Services Organisation | 86,689 |
| Pollutant releases and waste transfers of Irish chemical and pharmaceutical plants | European Environment Agency | 19,871 |
| System of Health Accounts: health spending by function, provider and financing | Central Statistics Office | 13,706 |
| Parliamentary questions on medicines, drugs and the HPRA, 2020 onward | Houses of the Oireachtas | 10,323 |
| Research grant commitments, 2000 onward | Research Ireland | 8,475 |
| Health, medicines and medical technology tenders and awards | Office of Government Procurement (eTenders) | 6,914 |
| Health in Ireland: Key Trends tables (GMS prescriptions, medical cards, workforce, spending) | Department of Health | 1,350 |
The new files sit alongside the 38 datasets already in the collection, which cover clinical trials, medicine approvals, shortages, safety alerts, patents, trade and research from Irish, European, UK, US and Canadian regulators.
Why Irish health system data matters
Until now, Airmid Éireann was strongest on medicines and trials. Version 1.3 adds the other side of the picture: how much the State spends on health, how many people pass through its hospitals and with what conditions, what the HSE and hospitals buy, and what members of the Oireachtas ask the Minister for Health about medicines.
Several of these sources were already public, but scattered across PxStat tables, departmental spreadsheets and procurement files in different layouts. In Airmid Éireann each one has the same shape: a CSV, a JSON file, a data dictionary and a record of its source, licence and collection date. The parliamentary questions, for example, can now be filtered by the medicine or topic they mention and opened in the official record with one link.
Northern Ireland GP prescribing is the first all-island dataset in the collection. Its BNF substance codes match those of the NHS England prescription cost data already included, so prescribing of the same medicine can be compared across the two systems.
Every licence checked before release
Before version 1.3 went out, the licence of each of the 46 datasets was checked against the terms published by its own publisher, rather than against earlier notes. No dataset had to be removed, but the labels of 14 existing datasets were corrected.
- NIH RePORTER data is now labelled with the Open Database Licence (ODbL 1.0), which NIH declares for it, instead of public domain.
- ClinicalTrials.gov data now carries the National Library of Medicine's reuse conditions: credit, the date the data was processed, and a list of changes.
- OECD and NTPF data are labelled with their publishers' own terms, and the Eurostat and Oireachtas disclaimers are included.
Every dataset's datapackage.json now states its own licence, and the Zenodo record lists the collection as having multiple licences, one per dataset.
Two further datasets, the Department of Enterprise's employment permit statistics and its Annual Employment Survey, have been collected but are being held back. The Department's reuse page points to the national open licence, while its copyright page says the material is for personal use only, so the project has asked for written confirmation before publishing them.
How to use the data
All 46 datasets are free to download at priyalifescience.com/opendata/airmid/v1, with a search page that finds records by meaning and a catalog.json index for programs. A new step-by-step guide, How to use Airmid Éireann, explains who can use the data and how, with sections for patients, journalists, researchers, companies, public bodies and developers, copyable code in Python, JavaScript and R, and instructions for using the files with AI assistants such as Claude.
The code that collects the data is open source on GitHub under the EU Public Licence, and the project's home page sets out what is included and what is never shared. No personal names or contact details are published.
Frequently asked questions
Q: What is Airmid Éireann?
A: A free, open collection of public data on medicines, clinical trials, health services and the pharmaceutical industry, built around Ireland and run by Priya Life Science. Version 1.3 holds 46 datasets and 1,247,825 records.
Q: How often is Airmid Éireann updated?
A: The data is refreshed every week, on Monday morning, and each dataset records the date it was collected.
Q: Can the data be used commercially?
A: Most datasets allow commercial reuse with credit, under CC BY 4.0, the Open Government Licence, CC0 or public domain terms. A few carry their own conditions, which are stated in each dataset's datapackage.json.
Q: How do I cite version 1.3?
A: Use the DOI 10.5281/zenodo.23499798 for this version, or 10.5281/zenodo.23336432 for all versions, and credit the original publisher of each dataset.
What comes next
The next stage, now in planning, compares Ireland with other European countries using national open data from France, Italy, the Netherlands, Scotland and the Nordic countries, joined by the international ATC medicine codes. The two Department of Enterprise datasets will be added once the licence is confirmed. Each release is listed in the project's changelog and archived on Zenodo with its own DOI.
