OBJECTIVES: To assess the impact of the Irish economic recession (September, 2008) and the Irish Pharmaceutical Healthcare Association agreement (IPHA; November, 2012) on the probability of reimbursement decided by the National Centre for Pharmacoeconomic Evaluation (NCPE). We also aim to test whether the new IPHA agreement reduced the time-to-reimbursement for new medicines in the General Medical Services (GMS) and High Tech Drug Scheme (HTDS). METHODS:  A database of all NCPE decisions since 2006 to present was compiled from publically available NCPE decision reports and a logistic model was used to test the occurrence of the recession and the IPHA agreement on the rate of positive reimbursement made by the NCPE. We also tested whether the new agreement had an impact on the time-to-reimbursement using a linear regression model. RESULTS: The results of the logit model suggest that neither the economic recession nor the agreement had any statistically significant impact on the probability of reimbursement. However, there was some evidence that the time-to-reimbursement was reduced after the agreement (p<0.10). CONCLUSIONS: Although the analysis suggests that these two events had no impact on the rate of reimbursement it is possible that the reimbursement price of new drugs may have decreased over this period which could have facilitated reimbursement. Unfortunately, details of the final price of medicines are not always known in the Irish system and it is therefore not possible to test this hypothesis using currently available data. Our analysis of time-to-reimbursement suggests that the new agreement may have satisfied one of its main objectives in getting new medicines onto the market sooner.