Ireland’s ‘Viagra Village’ in the eye of Trump’s tariff storm 

RINGASKIDDY, Ireland — When Pfizer started manufacturing its anti-impotence drug Viagra in southwestern Ireland, locals experienced a spike in sexual arousal, five-legged rabbits proliferated, and visitors took U-turns back to their spouses after fumes from its local plant drifted in through their car windows.  

That’s according to local legend, at least. 

These stories “transited through the local pub,” said Pat Hennessy, a long-term resident of Shanbally, just up the road from the coastal village of Ringaskiddy. “There was a girl there and she said: ‘One whiff and they’re stiff.’”  

The impact of Big Pharma on the area, however, goes far beyond amusing anecdotes: Its arrival in the 1970s turned a sleepy fishing village into an industrial powerhouse and turbocharged economic growth in County Cork. But today, the industry — and the region that depends on it — are in the eye of U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariff storm. 

As he drives to slash the massive U.S. trade deficit, Trump says he is determined to reshore the production of weight-loss drugs, cancer treatments and other pharmaceuticals. He has threatened to eventually slam tariffs as high as 250 percent on the sector. 

Ireland, Trump says, “took our pharmaceutical companies away” with its tax policies: Of the $213 billion of medicines the U.S. imports, the largest share comes from Ireland, a global leader in the production of expensive brand-name medicines. Dublin’s liberal tax regime has exerted an irresistible pull on U.S. Big Pharma for decades. 

Locals find only limited solace in a deal struck in July between the European Union and the White House which — at least on paper — caps U.S. tariffs on pharmaceutical imports from the EU at 15 percent and exempts generic medicines. Ireland, as one of the EU’s most open economies, is particularly vulnerable to the tariffs, and uncertainty persists over Trump’s next moves and the damage they could inflict. 

“It’s still like an axe hanging over us,” said David Collins, the fifth-generation owner of a family-run store in Carrigaline, a commuter town 20 minutes by bike from Ringaskiddy. “It’s a constant threat.” 

The area is home to seven of the 10 largest pharma companies worldwide. More than 11,000 people in County Cork work in the industry — with tens of thousands more in ancillary jobs.

Ringaskiddy alone hosts Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson, Sterling Pharma Solutions producing for Novartis, as well as smaller firms such as Recordati, BioMarin and Hovione. In addition to Viagra’s active ingredient, critical components of cardiology, immunology and oncology medications are made here.  

Pitch and putt 

When Pfizer arrived in 1969, its workers spent their lunch breaks building a course to play pitch and putt — a scaled-down version of golf — for the local community, recalled Michael Goably, a pensioner, while enjoying his morning coffee at the clubhouse of Raffeen Creek Golf Club, nestled on the lush shores of Cork harbour. 

As the name suggests, a nine-hole golf course, also built on land owned by Pfizer, now complements the pitch and putt. It’s just one example of how the area has benefited from big pharma: Ask the locals, and they’ll tell you the industry’s contribution far outweighs the side effects, such as commuter traffic and environmental pollution. 

“I couldn’t say a bad word,” said Ray Keohane, another golfer taking a break on a bench between rounds. 

The town of Carrigaline, once an agricultural village, now counts 20,000 residents, as well as a hotel, several supermarkets and a lively shopping street. 

“When I was a child growing up in Carrigaline, there was one main industry, and it was called Carrigaline Pottery … there wasn’t a family in the area of Carrigaline that didn’t at least have one person working in the pottery,” said Collins, the supermarket owner. 

“Roll on 50 years later, that’s been replaced by the pharmaceutical industries.” 

Celtic Tiger 

The arrival of multinational corporations softened the impact of the closure of manufacturing sites by carmaker Ford and Dunlop, a tyre company, in the 1980s.

“Ireland as a country wasn’t doing well, but Cork was a particularly black spot then,” said John O’Brien, a lecturer in finance at University College Cork. “The combination of pharmaceuticals and IT … together really have brought up the city,” he added, referring to Ireland’s second-largest city Cork, which hosts the EU headquarters of tech giant Apple.  

Nationally, the success in the pharma sector helped drive economic growth in Ireland’s “Celtic Tiger” era from the 1990s to the late 2000s. That’s thanks to large-scale foreign investment — especially from the U.S. — low corporate taxes, a skilled English-speaking workforce and EU membership. 

According to Louis Brennan, an emeritus professor at Trinity College Dublin, pharma’s contribution was threefold: It created high-value and high-paying jobs, led to the development of an ecosystem of suppliers and subcontractors, and generated government revenues.  

Cork has also established itself as a hub for higher education in pharma-related fields.  

Tariff games 

Since Trump’s return to the White House, that engine of the Irish economy finds itself under (verbal) attack, exposing just how much Irish success hinges on the country’s capacity to remain the go-to location for U.S. firms, which beyond welcoming tax benefits have also long shifted their profits and patents there. 

“We want pharmaceuticals made in our country,” Trump told CNBC in August. 

As part of his vow to slash drug prices and bring manufacturing back to the U.S., Trump in April opened a so-called Section 232 investigation into the pharmaceutical sector to probe the impact of imports on national security and impose tariffs if needed.  

Analysts estimate that Trump is unlikely to impose a tariff as high as the threatened 200 or 250 percent. However, a first “lower tariff” — no higher than 15 percent, provided Trump does indeed stick to the terms of the EU-U.S. agreement — could yet be followed by a heavily disruptive tariff of around 50 percent after a year or two.

The message isn’t lost on big pharma: Giants such as Eli Lilly and Johnson & Johnson have this year announced new investments in the U.S. Yet experts warn Trump’s tariff policy risks driving up drug prices and leading to shortages, rather than spurring large-scale relocation. 

While the 15 percent tariff cap foreseen by the EU-U.S. deal offers the industry a reprieve, companies need to make tricky calculations, warned Dan O’Brien, chief economist at the Institute of International and European Affairs, an Irish think tank. 

“For those products that are uniquely made in Ireland there is at least some element of a buffer: It’ll take a few years for production to move out of Ireland, in a worst-case scenario,” he said. For products also made elsewhere, it will be easier to shift production and “could happen more quickly,” he added. 

Risky business  

For now, those scenarios remain hypothetical — but the unpredictability is already leaving its mark.  

As companies rushed to export their goods, Irish pharma exports to the U.S. surged by nearly 50 percent in the first five months of this year. “Geopolitical concerns” now rank among the top three threats to business in the Cork Chamber of Commerce’s last survey of its members. 

Companies are mostly keeping quiet. Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson declined to comment for this story, whereas Sterling Pharma Solutions, BioMarin, Recordati and Hovione did not respond to requests for comment. Novartis, which is supplied by Sterling Pharma Solutions, warned that “the introduction of tariffs risks creating additional barriers that could further delay access to life-saving treatments.” 

Reacting to the deal between the EU-U.S. deal, the Irish Pharmaceutical Healthcare Association warned that “tariffs on medicines would be a substantial new cost where there was none before and a drag on investment, jobs and innovation.” 

A worker at a pharma plant in the area, granted anonymity to protect their job security, told POLITICO output had slowed in the last couple of months as the company waited to regain planning certainty.

Similarly, Dan Boyle, a Green Party councillor for Cork and the city’s former mayor, said companies told him that “our hope was that we would have announced future investment for 2030, and that’s being sat on, until we know what the situation is going to be.” 

Under pressure 

Local, national and European politicians are acutely aware of just how much is at stake. 

Séamus McGrath, a Dáil deputy for the Cork South-Central constituency, called for a “continuous process of renegotiation and engagement” with Washington.  

“We need to renew our pitch and renew our attraction as a country for foreign direct investment,” said McGrath, sitting in the lobby of the Carrigaline Court Hotel, the town’s only hotel. “You cannot sit back.”  

The politician with the co-governing centrist Fianna Fáil party entertains strong ties with Brussels, not least thanks to his brother, EU Justice Commissioner Michael McGrath. 

In the EU capital, lawmakers from the region are urging the EU to boost the bloc’s competitiveness. Cynthia Ní Mhurchú, of the liberal Renew Europe group, called for cutting “excessive red tape” for businesses. And Seán Kelly, an MEP with the centre-right European People’s Party, welcomed the European Commission’s plans to secure access to new markets through trade deals. 

After all, for locals back on the Irish coast, power politics determine no less than their personal future. 

“They say they [the big companies] will go away,” said Amy Lyons, a bartender at Ringaskiddy’s only pub, The Ferry Boat Inn.   

“I’m doing a biopharma course in college. So, imagine I get my degree, and they are gone,” she added as she drew pints for the regulars, who were discussing a new road being built to ease road congestion — caused by commuter traffic to the pharma plants. 

Graphics by Hanne Cokelaere.