You’ll rarely hear someone say they’re from Little Island, County Cork. The long road into town, lined with green metal fences and replete with two-lane roundabouts, passes through an industrial estate – home to a KFC, a car testing centre and the household retailer Harvey Norman, among others. In the evenings and on weekends, the area is deserted. Locals boast that, during these times, they don’t see another soul while out walking. “It’s so peaceful after 7pm,” one woman pushing a pram smiles to me. “It’s like the place has a double life.”
Neighbouring Corkonians tend to look less favourably on Little Island. Some liken it to Shutter Island; others describe it as a liminal space, or a facade. “It’s like stepping into the twilight zone,” says a young man waiting for a train into Cork city. “It’s more like The Truman Show, actually,” his friend proffers. “The same people pretend they work in whatever shop or restaurant you visit.” By evening, Little Island may be something of an unnerving, uncanny valley. But on weekdays, from about 8am, it swells with people, there to produce the town’s most potent export.
Since 1998, Viagra – the brand name for sildenafil, a medication used to treat erectile dysfunction – has been manufactured in Little Island, first by the pharma giant Pfizer, then by Viatris. (The rumour the plant’s fumes pass the benefits of the drug to locals via the tapwater has been laughed off by Pfizer as “an amusing myth”.) Today, the town produces the majority of the world’s supply.
That Ireland’s history with sex is fraught simply adds to the Brontëan romance of this tale. “What few could have predicted was that Ireland would become centre stage in the international push to prolong erections,” the historian Diarmaid Ferriter wrote in his 2024 book The Revelation of Ireland. In the process, it helped to pull a nation from recession, part of “an economic boom – also powerful and throbbing – that some came to believe would last as long as they wanted it to”. But today, plans for the factory’s closure are imminent – a final turn of the page on a chapter of Ireland’s sexual history.
How did a tiny Irish rurality, a former fishing village-cum-industrial estate, come to be responsible for creating and sustaining the world’s erections?
Ask anyone how Ireland became the epicentre for some of the world’s sexiest drugs – another Irish coastal town, Westport, makes some 80 per cent of the world’s Botox – and they’ll likely mention three words: low corporation tax. In 1999 Ireland’s then finance minister, Charlie McCreevy, dropped the levy from 32 per cent to 12.5 per cent, but the history of Ireland’s allure to pharmaceuticals is far deeper.
Some 40 years earlier, in the mid 1960s, Ireland’s foreign investment agency, the IDA, engaged the US consultants Arthur D Little to assist in a major reappraisal of its programme to attract foreign industry. They recommended government investment in and initiatives focusing on Ireland’s strengths, including the economic sectors that were growing at the time, of which pharmaceuticals was one.
In the following decades, as foreign investors were persuaded to consider Ireland for their expansions, a combination of factors contributed to Ireland’s drug production scene: a highly educated workforce (free second-level education was introduced to Ireland in 1967), consistent investment in Stem subjects, government policy such as the First Programme for Economic Expansion, a strong regulatory environment, an English-speaking workforce and EU membership.
From the late 1990s on, in the attempt to recover from the desolation and low employment of the previous decade – a time marred by high interest rates and ballooning national debt – Ireland redoubled its efforts to court foreign business (including with McCreevy’s intervention on corporation tax). In 2011, for example, two Irish subsidiaries of the US multinational Abbott Laboratories, Abbott Mature Products International and Abbott Laboratories Vascular Enterprises, paid no tax, according to the Irish Times, despite reporting profits of €1.8bn and €1.1bn respectively. Today, Ireland’s pharmaceutical industry employs more than 50,000 people.
As to how Cork specifically became the home of Viagra, Pat McCarthy, author of A History of the Irish Pharmaceutical Industry and a former stalwart of the drugs manufacturing world, attributes it to one man. “The US company Pfizer in the 1960s was a world-dominant player in citric acid, a compound used primarily in flavouring and preservatives, but also in cleaning, cosmetics and pharmaceuticals,” he told me. “When looking to expand their European presence, their research and development team originally fixated on Sandwich in Kent. However, a member of the board, John A Mulcahy, insisted upon Ireland.”
Mulcahy was active during Ireland’s War of Independence and later imprisoned for his involvement in the Irish Civil War, having found himself on the losing side. When released, he moved to New York and quickly rose through the ranks of Pfizer-Quigley Magnicide, becoming a major shareholder and chair of the board. When planning expansion, he asked the project team to consider his homeland of Ireland. After discovering that the port in Ringaskiddy, south-east Cork, was deep enough to import big tankers of molasses coming from South Africa – a key ingredient in citric acid – the decision was made.
Pfizer opened a plant in Ringaskiddy in 1969, and “upon realising how successful it was, they quickly built two more”, McCarthy said. Pharmaceutical companies around the world began to notice, and the state capitalised on this interest by offering more favourable opportunities. “The IDA wanted several plants side by side to share specialist knowledge, skilled people and ultimately create something from the wisdom of clustering.”
Today, Viatris’s Little Island factory sits just 16km from Pfizer’s in Ringaskiddy. The area is still dominated by drug developers: Johnson & Johnson, Thermo Fisher Scientific (which in 2019 acquired GlaxoSmithKline), Sterling (formerly Novartis), Hovione, Recordati and BioMarin all have premises there.
Viagra helps men obtain and maintain an erection by improving blood flow to the penis when aroused. It was developed by Pfizer in the UK in the late 1980s and was initially intended to treat cardiovascular disease, until its useful side effect was discovered in clinical trials. Since 2020, Viagra has been produced by the American giant Viatris.
Its arrival on the US market in 1998 began a wave of cultural interest, inspiring songs such as “Little Blue Pill” by Mac McAnally in 1999, and earning the nicknames “vitamin V” or “blue diamond”. But its introduction in Ireland that same year was even more seismic. “Viagra arrived in Ireland before sex ed came into schools,” said Caroline West, a sex educator and sexual violence and harassment prevention and response manager at University College Cork. “That speaks volumes on where we were at the time.” In 1998, the same year the Playboy founder Hugh Hefner dubbed the drug “God’s little helper”, people in Ireland were still regularly refused contraception by their doctor, and sex education was so poor that it was made mandatory in both primary and secondary schools (an intervention not made in England until 2020).
“The 1990s were a time of huge change in Ireland when it came to sexuality,” West continued. “Young girls were getting pregnant and having absolutely no idea how it happened, resulting in formal sexual education happening for the first time. Bear in mind, the last Magdalene laundry [institutions usually run by Catholic orders that confined unwed mothers to prison-like workhouses] had closed just two years earlier [than the introduction of mandatory sex education]”.
In 1993 homosexual acts were decriminalised, and in 1995 the constitution was amended by referendum to remove the prohibition on divorce. But reminders of Ireland’s doctrinaire Catholic past persisted, despite the nation having one of the youngest populations in Europe at that time. Married couples were often unable to buy condoms in certain pharmacies, even after the law changed to allow it.
Eventually, it was economics that shifted the culture. “The openness of Ireland’s economy was clearly working in its favour,” Ferriter writes in The Revelation of Ireland. The rise of the Celtic Tiger, a period of dramatic economic growth from 1995 to 2007, significantly altered attitudes toward sex by increasing female participation in the workforce, which led to greater support for female financial independence and a growing recognition of their roles beyond the home.
Today, Little Island is threatened not by Catholic prudery but by a phenomenon far more Protestant: tariffs. “Even a small percentage tariff on health products, including medicines and their components, would damage patient care and the pharmaceutical sector in the EU and the US,” the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations has warned. “Tariffs threaten global medicine supply chains, hinder research and development and ultimately harm patients and communities around the world.”
Viatris plans to close its manufacturing plant in Little Island in 2028, with operations shifted to its plants in Galway and Dublin. Could this mean the end of Cork’s long contribution to lovemaking? “I hope not,” a Fine Gael councillor for the area, Jack White, told me. “You know, some of the highly educated workforce in these factories are fourth-generation… You can see how much these companies mean to both local families and Ireland’s GDP.”
White paused, considering how to tactfully phrase his next point. “I hope a way can be found for us to continue to do what we do best here… even in the face of tariffs. I hope the presence of these companies here can justify a continued investment into, I suppose, lovemaking. Because it’s clear we’ve been quite good at that so far.”
[Further reading: How to sell priceless stolen jewels]
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This article appears in the 23 Oct 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Doom Loop
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