Pharma manufacturing sites in Ireland: 332 sites, county by county

The island of Ireland in one map: 332 sites

This report counts the sites in our Ireland pharma and medtech map, which we maintain by hand from company announcements, IDA Ireland and Invest Northern Ireland releases, regulator records and the companies' own websites. On the date of this snapshot the map held 332 manufacturing sites: 296 in the Republic of Ireland and 36 in Northern Ireland. They belong to 304 companies, of which 23 operate two or more sites.

By province, Munster has 105 sites, Leinster 104, Connacht 80 and Ulster 43. The near tie between Munster and Leinster hides a difference in character. Leinster's total is driven by Dublin and its commuter counties, while Munster's is spread across Cork, Waterford, Limerick, Clare, Tipperary and Kerry. Connacht's 80 sites are the most concentrated of all: 50 of them are in Galway.

Pharma manufacturing sites in Ireland by county

Three counties account for 138 sites, or 42 per cent of the total. Galway's lead rests on medical devices, Cork's on pharmaceuticals and biopharma, and Dublin's on a mix of both plus the service, packaging and radiopharmacy businesses that cluster near the capital and its hospitals.

Thirty-one of the island's 32 counties have at least one site. Fermanagh is the only county with none in our map. Each county has its own page, for example Galway, Cork and Dublin, listing every site with its products, sources and the latest announcements.

The second tier is instructive. Waterford's 17 sites and Limerick's 16 reflect two long-established pharmaceutical clusters, the first around the city and Dungarvan, the second around Raheen and the Shannon estuary. Clare's 13 sites are mostly in the Shannon Free Zone. Sligo's 11 and Westmeath's 10 show how medtech and pharma have spread to regional towns, Sligo around orthopaedics and Athlone around biopharma and devices.

Northern Ireland's 36 sites

Northern Ireland contributes 36 sites across five counties. Antrim has 17, which includes the Belfast and Craigavon area plants, Down and Derry have 7 each, Armagh has 3 and Tyrone has 2. Fermanagh has none. The Northern Ireland sites lean towards diagnostics, contract manufacturing and pharmaceutical packaging, with Randox in Antrim and Almac Group in Craigavon each running two sites in our map.

We include Northern Ireland because supply chains, recruitment and regulators operate across the island. A medtech engineer in Derry competes for the same jobs as one in Letterkenny, and a Belfast diagnostics company serves the same hospitals as a Dublin one. Readers who need Republic-only figures can use the 296-site total above.

What the sites make

We label each site by its main product as the company describes it. Medical devices is the largest label with 99 sites, before adding the many sites recorded under more specific device descriptions. Pharmaceuticals account for 49 sites and biopharma for 17, with a further 5 labelled as both. Hospital and homecare medical products account for 13, contract medtech manufacturing and CDMO services for 11, diagnostics for 9 and animal health for 9.

Among the specific device descriptions, orthopaedic devices and medical gases have 4 sites each, in-vitro diagnostics 3, and vaccines, infant nutrition and ophthalmic devices 2 each. Two sites make radiopharmaceuticals, the short-lived isotopes used in PET scanning, which must be produced close to the hospitals that use them. The long tail of single-site descriptions runs from catheters and nitinol components to blood component processing, cell therapy manufacturing and veterinary diagnostic kits.

The labels are free text taken from the companies, so a site that makes both devices and diagnostics appears once under whichever description the company leads with. The counts are therefore a floor for each category, not a precise census. Read together, roughly a third of the island's sites make medical devices or device components, a fifth make pharmaceuticals or biopharmaceuticals, and the rest cover diagnostics, animal health, nutrition, gases and contract services.

Clusters: companies with more than one site

Twenty-three companies run two or more sites on the island. MSD has the most, with 5 sites in our map, spread across Carlow, Cork, Dublin, Louth, Meath and Tipperary when its licensed sites are counted. Boston Scientific and Zoetis have 3 each. Companies with 2 sites include AbbVie, Aerogen, Almac Group, Edwards Lifesciences, Randox, Teva and Zimmer Biomet. Grouping sites under their parent hubs, Stryker and Abbott each link to 7 Irish entries, MSD to 6 and AbbVie to 5.

The multi-site companies explain much of the county pattern. Galway's device cluster grew around Boston Scientific and Medtronic and now includes dozens of suppliers and spin-outs. Cork's pharmaceutical cluster around Ringaskiddy, Little Island and Carrigtwohill grew around Pfizer, Johnson and Johnson and Eli Lilly and now hosts MSD, Thermo Fisher, Hovione and Merck Millipore among others.

Recent announcements on the map

Twenty-two sites carry a recent announcement in our map, recorded from the company or agency release: an expansion, a new line, a new plant or a closure. The product descriptions themselves record several of the larger investments of the last two years, including a filtration devices plant for biopharma manufacturing opened in September 2025, a catheter research and manufacturing building opened in September 2024, and an advanced medical nutrition liquid plant due in 2028. One site is recorded as closed in 2025 and is kept on the map for the record, because the history of a cluster matters as much as its present.

Irish medtech reaches the US: 456 FDA clearances

The device side of the map shows up clearly in US regulatory data. The US Food and Drug Administration's 510(k) database lists 456 device clearances to applicants with an Irish address, as of 14 September 2026. Of these, 421 are Class II devices, the moderate-risk class that covers most catheters, implants and diagnostic instruments, and 25 are Class I. Galway addresses account for 174 of the clearances, Limerick for 35, Cork for 29, Ringaskiddy for 21 and Crumlin in Dublin for 21. Clearances to Irish applicants have run at a steady 20 to 29 a year since 2021. Our medical devices register lists each one with its product code and decision date.

The FDA figures are a useful check on the map. Galway's share of clearances, 38 per cent, is higher than its share of sites, 15 per cent, which tells you that its device plants are larger and more export-oriented than the average site elsewhere.

What this report does not count

We do not report employee numbers here. Headcounts in public sources are inconsistent, often out of date and sometimes compiled by third parties under terms that do not allow reuse. Where a company states its own site headcount in an announcement, it appears on that site's map entry with the source. For official employment figures use the CSO's Business in Ireland releases and IDA Ireland's annual reports, which count the sector rather than the site.

We also do not count research-only sites, sales offices or distribution warehouses. A site is on the map because something is made, processed, packaged or tested there.

Method and sources

The map is a curated dataset: every site was added by hand from a named public source, and the file records the company, county, region, product label, source link and any announcements. County assignment follows the site address. Northern Ireland sites are included because supply chains, regulators and recruitment operate across the island; the Republic-only figure is given above for readers who need it. Product categories are the companies' own descriptions, grouped only where the wording is identical. Percentages are rounded. FDA 510(k) figures were filtered on an applicant country code of IE and counted by decision date, from the database as held on 14 September 2026.

Reuse and citation: the map and this analysis are published by Priya Life Science under CC BY 4.0. FDA 510(k) records are US government public data. Cite the report using the box below; our methodology page explains how the map is maintained and corrections are logged on our corrections page.