An Irish government-backed enterprise fund has, for the first time in its 10-year history, named a cannabis company its High Potential Start-up (HPSU) Founder of the Year award.
Enterprise Ireland, the state agency responsible for supporting the development of ‘indigenous’ Irish companies, has awarded pharmaceutical cannabis manufacturer Dunbar Pharmaceuticals‘ chief executive, Leah Fletcher, its ‘founder of the year’ for 2026.
Ireland remains one of the most restrictive medical cannabis markets in Europe, with less than 100 patients approved under its Medical Cannabis Access Programme (MCAP), alongside a cautious regulatory approach to industrial hemp and CBD retail.
Dunbar’s recognition highlights how pharmaceutical cannabinoid manufacturing fits within Ireland’s existing life sciences strategy. It shows a willingness to treat a cannabinoid producer as straightforwardly as any other EU-GMP pharmaceutical business.
“The Irish government have always been open to access for patients to a certain degree,” Fletcher told Business of Cannabis: “Where they haven’t changed is in adjusting what is appropriately regulated pharma products…
“In relation to how they view cannabis and medical cannabis and cannabinoids, I don’t see anywhere close to the negative feedback that I would have seen in the very beginning. There was no difference between me as a cannabinoid producer and someone on the stage at the Founders Forum that had a tech company. There were none of the cannabis jokes or the negative feedback that I might have gotten five years ago. People are closer to understanding the medical application and benefits of cannabinoid medicines.”
Ireland looking outward
Enterprise Ireland’s support of Dunbar comes against the backdrop of a thriving, but fundamentally unbalanced pharmaceutical industry.
Pharmaceutical exports hit a record €139bn in 2025, roughly 53% of all Irish goods exports, and the sector contributed more than €6bn in tax, over 15% of corporation tax receipts in 2024, according to a Goodbody report presented at the Irish Pharmaceutical Healthcare Association’s annual conference in March.
It is also host to nine of the world’s ten largest pharmaceutical companies, including Jazz Pharma, Novo and Alexion. Yet, given Ireland’s relatively small population of just 5.5m people, they all focus on exporting medicines that often aren’t even available on the island.
“The government at the policy level sees an issue in relation to foreign direct investment and the Irish tax being so reliant on them. They need to get other companies that are Irish and Irish-owned off the ground and up and running,” Fletcher explained.
This is where Enterprise Ireland comes in, with a mandate to replicate this thriving pharmaceutical industry with indigenous companies.
“In the budget that was just released, there are additional supports for entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship and a specific focus on life sciences and things like R&D tax credits for companies doing innovative things,” she continued. “A big focus for them in the last year is to promote more life sciences and med-tech companies.”
According to Fletcher, Dunbar first approached Enterprise Ireland several years ago while it was still building out its Athlone facility, but support did not proceed at that stage.
Pre-EU-GMP certification, she said, the agency considered the company too high-risk, and further clarity on the regulatory position of cannabis in Ireland and the identified export markets was needed to assess the business.
Once Dunbar’s EU-GMP certification was in place, the agency reopened the conversation and brought Dunbar into its HPSU client cohort, which includes equity backing alongside the operational support the agency is better known for.
This ‘government-funded VC’, which by number of investments per year is the largest venture capital investment fund in Europe, is understood to be closely tied with the policy direction set by government ministers.
Dunbar is not Enterprise Ireland’s first cannabis-adjacent backing. The agency previously supported Irish CBD companies, including GreenLight Medicines, which closed a €1.8m round with Enterprise Ireland involvement in 2018. But a cannabis founder taking the HPSU Founder of the Year title appears to be a first.
Does this signal a shift in attitudes towards cannabis?
For Fletcher, the Irish government’s position on medical cannabis has always been more procedural than ideological.
“I think they brought in the MCAP programme as […] we need to address this issue very fast because it became a political issue,” she said. “But I think their focus still is that they need assurance that everything is GMP and goes through proper safety checks.
“If you were to come to them now with a proposal that had everything lined up and through EU GMP from start to finish, I can’t see them saying no.”
She framed Dublin’s caution on everything outside pharma-grade cannabinoid medicines, including the UK’s open-prescribing model, as reflecting a need for regulatory clarity and assurance around supply chains.
“The problem now is that I think policymakers and regulators get inundated with various types of supply chains and regulatory pathways within the industry,” Fletcher said.
“Cannabinoid regulations are still evolving across Europe and globally, with countries taking different approaches and amending their policies as those frameworks develop. That creates a complex and changing landscape for Irish policymakers to assess. I think Ireland’s caution reflects a desire for clear regulatory pathways and confidence in the standards underpinning these products.”
That procedural caution is already shaping the direction of travel across Europe. The commercial logic rests on the single-molecule argument that defines Dunbar’s business: pharmaceutical regulators require a base ingredient that is stable, measurable and reproducible, and flower cannot deliver that at scale.
“The alcohol industry is built on scalable ingredients,” Fletcher said. “You need that ethanol to make the alcohol. The same thing will apply for any sort of pharmaceutical as well. You need the base ingredient, and it needs to be stable and measured. And with flower, it’s just too difficult to do that.
“Naïve-ish patients and prescribers will always reach towards access to cannabinoids in more traditional pharmaceutical formats,” she added. “I think Europe is following suit now. But it’s not just consumer demand driving it here. It’s regulations.”
It is not the only market pushing towards a more pharmaceutically focused framework. Last month, Spain began delivering medical cannabis products to hospitals for the first time, opening an extremely narrow route for cannabis oils, prepared by hospital pharmacies and prescribed by a specialist.
Similarly, France’s incoming medical cannabis framework is in the final stages of approval before being rolled out nationally. Once it is, it will be regulated within the same framework as any other pharmaceutical product, unlike almost every other European market which has carved out a separate category for cannabis medicine.
Fletcher pointed to the Bedrocan supply saga as the counter-example. Bedrolite, the paediatric epilepsy product derived from Bedrocan’s own cultivars, is understood to supply only six or seven children in Ireland. Any disruption to that supply, she said, puts those patients at risk because a generic cannot be reconstructed from the finished extract without substantial development work.
“Because it comes extracted in that manner from the original plant, you’re creating a medicine that’s at risk,” Fletcher said. “That’s why isolating the compounds for serious medicines is probably the only way to go.”
Recognition of manufacturers and the development of patient access are progressing through distinct enterprise and healthcare policy processes in Ireland. Signed in by then-health minister Simon Harris in June 2019 as a five-year pilot, MCAP had approved 74 patients in total by March of this year, while only 22 consultants have ever submitted applications on patients’ behalf.
A formal review of MCAP and the ministerial licence pathway is now in the works, chaired by retired Trinity College Dublin epidemiologist Professor Shane Allwright, and is due to report within 12 months. Separately, the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Drugs Use published a 161-recommendation report in June, drawing on 13 months of hearings.
The committee called for a health-led response on cannabis short of full legalisation and specifically backed expanding MCAP. On the separate question of decriminalisation, Taoiseach Micheál Martin, Tánaiste Simon Harris and Justice Minister Jim O’Callaghan have each signalled that the government does not plan to implement the committee’s broader recommendations.
For Dunbar, that review timeline is why Ireland is not the near-term commercial focus. Fletcher said the company is prioritising markets where the regulatory ground is already settled.
“We need to go where the markets are already open, where physicians are experienced with cannabinoid prescriptions and where we don’t have to be a trailblazer as much,” she said.
She argued, though, that a well-supported pharma-grade proposal could offer a route forward within the Irish framework. Epidyolex and Sativex have reached the Irish market, she noted, with cost also affecting practical access.
Enterprise Ireland’s offices are now routing Dunbar towards NHS introductions in London, pharmaceutical wholesalers and regulatory specialists in Germany, and trade show infrastructure at CPHI and Expo Pharm. The company has committed to doubling its Athlone manufacturing capacity in 2027.
Dunbar’s award marks recognition of cannabis, in its pharma-grade form, within a life sciences strategy Ireland already supports. Spain and France are drawing the same line, treating cannabis in medicine as medicine. Broader reform inside Ireland now sits with a review process due to report within 12 months. By the time it does, Dunbar expects to have doubled its Athlone output.
