Airmid Éireann, Ireland's open pharma data project, released version 1.4 on 21 October 2026, adding 21 datasets that let Irish medicines, prices and prescribing be compared with six European countries and with international regulators. The free collection now holds 67 datasets and 1,735,033 records from 37 official publishers, each under its publisher's own open licence.
- Release: version 1.4.0, 21 October 2026, archived on Zenodo as 10.5281/zenodo.23532354.
- Size: 67 datasets and 1,735,033 records from 37 official publishers, up from 46 datasets and 1,247,825 records in version 1.3.
- Europe: 14 datasets from France, the Netherlands, Italy, Scotland, Finland and Norway.
- The world: seven datasets from the U.S. FDA, Health Canada, Singapore, New Zealand and the World Bank.
- Cost: free, with no account or key, as CSV and JSON files.
What Airmid Éireann 1.4 adds from Europe
The European datasets come from national medicines agencies, health insurers and health statistics bodies, and they share the international ATC medicine codes or the British BNF codes, so the same medicine can be followed from one country to the next.
| Country | What the new datasets cover | Records |
|---|---|---|
| France | Medicines register with prices and reimbursement rates, compositions, HAS benefit ratings, ANSM availability notices, and national dispensing from the health insurer (Open Medic) | 149,870 |
| Scotland | Prescriptions in the community, monthly, latest 36 months | 65,711 |
| Italy | Reimbursed medicines and prices, shortages, clinical trials, manufacturing sites and medicine spending | 30,485 |
| Finland | Fimea medicines register and shortage notices | 28,683 |
| Netherlands | Medicine use, users and cost by ATC code, 2012 to 2025 | 17,795 |
| Norway | FEST register with prices, reimbursement and substitution groups | 10,817 |
With Scotland added, the collection now holds GP prescribing for Northern Ireland, England and Scotland, all coded the same way. In July 2026, for example, the cholesterol medicine atorvastatin was prescribed 163,590 times in Northern Ireland and 367,875 times in Scotland, by the figures of the two health services.
Ireland in a global context
The international datasets follow Irish-made medicines and Irish companies abroad, and set Ireland's health spending beside other countries'.
- Singapore: the Health Sciences Authority's register of 5,511 therapeutic products records each product's country of manufacture. 147 of them list Ireland.
- United States: the FDA's directory of 78,961 prescription and bulk drug products, with Irish companies such as Pfizer Ireland and Takeda Ireland among the labelers, and 18,042 FDA drug recalls since 2004.
- Canada: 23,652 Health Canada Notices of Compliance since 1994 and 13,304 recalls of drugs, devices and health products.
- New Zealand: the 2,507 funded medicines on PHARMAC's Pharmaceutical Schedule.
- World Bank: health spending, life expectancy and economic indicators for every country from 2000. Ireland's current health expenditure was 6.9 per cent of GDP in 2024, up from 6.0 per cent in 2022, by the World Bank's figures.
Every licence checked
Each new source was checked against the reuse terms on its publisher's own website before release. They include CC BY 4.0 (Italy's AIFA, Finland's Fimea, PHARMAC and the World Bank), France's Licence Ouverte and BDPM licence, the Dutch CC0 dedication, Norway's open government licence, the UK and Canadian Open Government Licences, the Singapore Open Data Licence and the U.S. public domain. Every dataset's file states its licence and the credit to use.
The French register's licence forbids altering its data, so the project changed its privacy check, which had mistaken very large dose figures in some gene therapy names for phone numbers. No personal names or contact details are published in any dataset.
Some planned sources are not yet included. U.S. Census trade data and Korea's drug approvals need registered access keys, the FDA's inspection results are only available through an interactive dashboard, and permission requests sent on 21 October to ten bodies, among them the Department of Enterprise, the HSE, the National Cancer Registry, the WHO and UN Comtrade, are awaiting replies.
How to use the data
All 67 datasets are free to download at priyalifescience.com/opendata/airmid/v1, with a search page and a catalog.json index for programs. The guide How to use Airmid Éireann explains, for each kind of reader, which datasets to start with and how to open them in Excel, code or AI assistants. The collection is also on GitHub and Kaggle, and the project's home page sets out what is included.
Frequently asked questions
Q: What is new in Airmid Éireann 1.4?
A: 21 datasets from France, the Netherlands, Italy, Scotland, Finland, Norway, the U.S. FDA, Health Canada, Singapore, New Zealand and the World Bank, bringing the collection to 67 datasets and 1,735,033 records.
Q: Can I compare a medicine across countries?
A: Yes. The registers and medicine-use datasets carry ATC codes, and the UK prescribing datasets share BNF codes, so they can be joined on the same medicine.
Q: Is the data free to reuse?
A: Yes, under each publisher's licence, which is stated in every dataset's datapackage.json. Most allow commercial reuse with credit.
Q: How do I cite version 1.4?
A: Use the DOI 10.5281/zenodo.23532354 for this version, or 10.5281/zenodo.23336432 for all versions, and credit each dataset's original publisher.
What comes next
Datasets from bodies that grant permission will be added in later releases, along with the two Department of Enterprise datasets once their licence is confirmed. The data is refreshed every week, and each release is archived on Zenodo with its own DOI.
