Cryonics in Ireland
Ireland dossier

Understanding cryonics in Ireland

Local planning, European response and storage in Switzerland

The precise technical term is cryonics; cryogenics and freezing are common search variants, while cryopreservation and biostasis are related terms.

Ireland in detail

Cryonics in Ireland: what the sources show

What is different for Ireland

If you live in Ireland, you are inside what Tomorrow.bio calls its core region. After the procedure, the company drives the patient to storage in Switzerland. This section keeps to what we could check for Ireland. Where we could check nothing, it says so.

Sources: Procedure and coverage, Procedure and coverage

One Irish rule is easy to state: every death that takes place in Ireland must be recorded and registered. A text search of four Irish official pages on registration, sending a body abroad, burial and cremation found no mention of cryopreservation or freezing, so we cannot tell you whether Irish law allows it, tolerates it or regulates it.

Sources: Registering a death, Registering a death (text search), Sending a body from Ireland for burial or cremation abroad (text search), Burials and burial grounds (text search), Cremations (text search)

What the Irish press has said

On 2 September 2025 The Irish Times ran a feature on people in Ireland who pay to be cryopreserved, and its standfirst says a "handful" of those living there pay monthly for a process set in motion before they die. It quotes two people in Ireland who have signed up, and neither is named. The paper quotes the company's chief executive as saying that it is not yet possible to take someone out of cryopreservation, and that for members it is "just a chance" and "not a guarantee by any means".

Sources: ‘I’m a fighter’: The Irish people paying to cryopreserve their bodies for life after death, ‘I’m a fighter’: The Irish people paying to cryopreserve their bodies for life after death, ‘I’m a fighter’: The Irish people paying to cryopreserve their bodies for life after death, ‘I’m a fighter’: The Irish people paying to cryopreserve their bodies for life after death, ‘I’m a fighter’: The Irish people paying to cryopreserve their bodies for life after death, ‘I’m a fighter’: The Irish people paying to cryopreserve their bodies for life after death, ‘I’m a fighter’: The Irish people paying to cryopreserve their bodies for life after death, ‘I’m a fighter’: The Irish people paying to cryopreserve their bodies for life after death

Earlier, on 18 November 2016, the Irish Mirror reported that an Irishman had signed up to be cryogenically frozen when he dies. The man said he had signed up in 1986, and the paper has him speaking to Sean O'Rourke on RTE Radio 1. We found no other Irish report on human cryopreservation. Our search was a news-index lookup rather than a full press archive, so read that as a gap in our search, not as a fact about Ireland.

Sources: Irishman signs up to be cryogenically frozen when he dies and thinks EVERYONE should do it, Irishman signs up to be cryogenically frozen when he dies and thinks EVERYONE should do it, Irishman signs up to be cryogenically frozen when he dies and thinks EVERYONE should do it, Irishman signs up to be cryogenically frozen when he dies and thinks EVERYONE should do it

Members and the map

Tomorrow.bio's statistics page, dated August 2026, ranks ten countries by members, from Germany with 276 to Poland with 25. Ireland is not on that list, and a text search of the page finds no mention of Ireland. The Irish Times quotes the company as saying that a "handful" of people in Ireland have signed up.

Sources: Tomorrow.bio stats, Tomorrow.bio stats (text search), ‘I’m a fighter’: The Irish people paying to cryopreserve their bodies for life after death

So this page shows no map pins and no Tomorrow.bio member figure for Ireland. A missing number is not a zero: we simply hold no verified count from the company.

Organisations

Tomorrow.bio says its headquarters is in Berlin, and it performs the procedure and keeps the standby teams ready. The European Biostasis Foundation is a non-profit foundation based in Rafz, Switzerland, where it runs a research and long-term preservation facility.

Sources: Meet the team, Long-term storage, European Biostasis Foundation, Facility

The Cryonics Institute, a separate organisation, lists one member in Ireland in its published statistics. That table shows no date, so we cannot say how recent the figure is. For the practical side, Citizens Information says you can engage an undertaker or funeral director to deal with most aspects of a funeral. We found no cryonics group based in Ireland, so we list none.

Sources: Member Statistics, Funeral arrangements and costs

A short timeline

The foundation's building in Rafz was handed over to it on 23 March 2022. Tomorrow.bio published its 2024 case reports in January 2025 and its 2025 reports in March 2026. The Irish thread is short: a man quoted in 2016 dated his own sign-up to 1986, and the 2025 feature reports that a handful of people in Ireland had by then signed up.

Sources: Facility, Facility, Case reports, Case reports, Irishman signs up to be cryogenically frozen when he dies and thinks EVERYONE should do it, ‘I’m a fighter’: The Irish people paying to cryopreserve their bodies for life after death

We found no dated source on the history of cryonics in Ireland beyond these items.

Documented cases

Tomorrow.bio says it publishes its case reports every year. Its statistics page counts 28 patients in storage as of August 2026, and the patients-by-country list on that page does not include Ireland. We did not open the individual case reports, so we cannot say whether any of them involves Ireland.

Sources: Case reports, Tomorrow.bio stats, Tomorrow.bio stats, Tomorrow.bio stats (text search)

No documented Irish case is shown here because none could be verified. That is a gap in our evidence, not a claim that there has been none.

Read the full Ireland page →

The knowledge base

Start with the question you actually have.

TOPIC 1.1

Definitions and concepts

This topic builds the conceptual foundation you need to think clearly about cryopreservation. It establishes core definitions, resolves common confusions between related fields, and explains the information-theoretic framework that makes the whole endeavor coherent.

Read 9 articles →TOPIC 1.2

Science of pausing life

The central claim of Biostasis is that identity survives if information survives. But you can't just assert this and move on.

Read 9 articles →TOPIC 1.3

Arguments, ethics and misconceptions

You can't think clearly about cryopreservation without confronting the ethical questions. This topic tackles the hard problems, whether it's morally defensible to pursue preservation now, what genuine informed consent looks like when the outcome is radically uncertain, and why most objections you've heard are either strawmen or built on false premises.

Read 7 articles →TOPIC 1.4

Limitations and challenges

The technology has real limitations: we can't preserve people alive, we can't currently reverse the process, and quality degrades rapidly once decay starts. Some of these are engineering problems that money and time might solve.

Read 5 articles →TOPIC 1.5

Future of revival

Cryopreservation only matters if revival is possible. You can't just hand-wave this part and say "future technology will figure it out." This topic pushes you to think concretely about what revival would actually require: the level of technology needed, the types of damage that must be reversed, and the plausible mechanisms that could work.

Read 4 articles →TOPIC 2.1

Economics of biostasis

The gap between "this seems worth doing" and actually doing it is usually economic, not philosophical. This topic exists to make the financial reality legible enough that cost stops being an excuse or a mystery.

Read 7 articles →TOPIC 2.2

Regulatory questions

Cryopreservation operates in legal gray zones that most people don't think about until it's too late. The goal here is to make you literate in the regulatory landscape so you're not blindsided by jurisdictional quirks, documentation requirements, or the fact that your legal status post-preservation is genuinely unsettled.

Read 5 articles →TOPIC 2.3

Modern cryopreservation procedures

Most people treat cryopreservation as a binary choice: sign up or don't. But execution quality matters enormously, and you can't evaluate quality without understanding the operational constraints.

Read 10 articles →TOPIC 2.4

Governance for centuries

You're making a bet that spans centuries, but most organizations don't survive decades. The fundamental problem isn't whether cryopreservation works, it's whether any institution can maintain continuous operations and aligned incentives over timeframes that dwarf normal corporate lifespans.

Read 4 articles →TOPIC 3.1

A love for life & curiosity

Do you have the kind of relationship with existence, that pursuing more of it feel obvious rather than strange? Some people genuinely want to see what happens next, love being alive enough to keep going, or view uncertainty about the far future as exciting rather than threatening.

Read 5 articles →TOPIC 3.2

The solitary decision

Choosing cryopreservation usually means choosing differently from everyone around you. This creates a specific kind of psychological difficulty that's distinct from the technical or economic questions.

Read 4 articles →TOPIC 3.3

The rational mindset

Most people approach death with resignation or spirituality, but there's a third path: treating it as an engineering problem with probabilistic solutions. This topic exists because cultural defaults around death aren't optimized for your actual survival.

Read 4 articles →TOPIC 3.4

Personal values & religion

Biostasis intersects with deeply held beliefs about what happens after death, whether consciousness is substrate-dependent, and what counts as a meaningful continuation of you. If you have religious commitments, you need to work out whether pursuing biological preservation conflicts with your theology or actually complements it.

Read 3 articles →TOPIC 4.1

The cost barrier

Cost is the first reason people give for not signing up, and it is usually the least examined one. The membership fee is only one part of the price.

Read 3 articles →TOPIC 4.2

The trust barrier

You are asked to trust an organization with something that cannot be verified until long after you are gone. Skepticism is the right starting point.

Read 4 articles →TOPIC 4.3

The social barrier

Choosing cryopreservation usually means explaining it to people who did not choose it. Partners, parents and friends may find it strange, frightening or wasteful, and their reaction can delay or block a decision you have already made.

Read 4 articles →TOPIC 4.4

The procrastination barrier

Many people decide that cryopreservation makes sense and then do nothing for years. The obstacle is rarely a missing argument.

Read 4 articles →TOPIC 5.1

From decision to action

Deciding in favor of cryopreservation is not the same as being cryopreserved. Between the two sit a provider choice, a contract, accepted funding, current documents and a notification plan that works when you cannot act yourself.

Read 3 articles →TOPIC 5.2

Tomorrow.bio advantage

Cryopreservation quality is decided in the field, in the hours after legal death, and by the institutions that have to keep working for decades afterwards. This topic exists to explain what Tomorrow.bio has built around that fact: a European response operation with whole-body field cryoprotection, standardized quality measurement for every patient, a Swiss long-term storage facility run by a separate foundation, engineering that starts from real cases, and research that keeps today's procedures and tomorrow's revival work clearly apart.

Read 8 articles →TOPIC 5.3

How to signup with Tomorrow.bio

Signing up with Tomorrow.bio is simple because each responsibility is clear: you provide accurate information, sign the contract, set up accepted funding and make early notification possible, while Tomorrow.bio guides onboarding and handles the operational side. This topic walks through each step: the digital contract, the Memberzone where your arrangement stays visible and current, the funding methods that qualify, the documents and contacts that make your wishes hold without depending on one relative, and the lifespan extension consultations that come with membership.

Read 6 articles →
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