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The co-founder of ADHD Now explains how a personal loss drove him to tackle Ireland's chronic shortage of timely ADHD and autism assessments, growing the bootstrapped business to roughly 60 per cent market share across the island.
Danny Buckley is the co-founder and director of ADHD Now, Ireland's largest private provider of ADHD assessment and treatment services. The organisation offers clinically led diagnosis and ongoing care for both children and adults across the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland.
Founded with the explicit mission of addressing the chronic shortage of timely neurodevelopmental assessments, ADHD Now has grown to capture approximately 60 per cent of the Irish private ADHD market, a remarkable achievement that reflects both the scale of unmet demand and the company's reputation for clinical rigour. The business combines telehealth with in-person care, supported by a network of more than 100 clinicians, and maintains partnerships with quality-assurance bodies to ensure that rapid access does not come at the expense of diagnostic accuracy or patient-centred practice.
The origin of ADHD Now is deeply personal. Buckley's late wife Simone was the person who first suggested that he might have ADHD, an observation he initially resisted. In her final words to him, she urged him to seek help for the condition. After her death, he pursued his own diagnosis and experienced directly the difficulty of obtaining timely assessment in Ireland.
That experience became the catalyst for building a service that could offer answers in weeks rather than the years that many patients were forced to wait. He describes his proudest moment in business as taking that painful personal journey and transforming it into a supportive clinical pathway that has since helped thousands of others gain clarity, understanding and a plan for moving forward. He emphasises that while commercial success matters, it is the human impact that truly defines the organisation.
During its early growth phase, ADHD Now faced a situation where demand for assessments dramatically outpaced clinical capacity. Thousands of patients were arriving seeking help, and the company bore a responsibility not to let them down. The response was to accelerate recruitment of expert clinicians, build robust supervision frameworks and establish the administrative infrastructure needed to allow clinicians to focus on patients rather than paperwork.
This defining period strengthened the organisation because the leadership refused to compromise on clinical standards despite intense pressure. The company has remained self-funded and bootstrapped from its earliest days, operating profitably and reinvesting continuously into growth. Looking ahead, Buckley expects demand for ADHD and autism assessment to continue rising as awareness grows and stigma diminishes.
Within three years, he anticipates a more regulated and more competitive private market, and ADHD Now intends to remain the clear market leader across the island of Ireland, serving as the trusted first point of contact for patients and general practitioners while expanding into new geographies. His advice to less experienced entrepreneurs is to get the fundamentals right early, including governance, compliance, contracts and quality.
Although these elements can feel like friction during rapid growth, they are precisely what enable credible scaling over time. Beyond the commercial considerations, he stresses the importance of knowing one's purpose. For him, that purpose remains Simone, and it is the memory of her that sustains his determination through the inevitable difficulties of building and leading a business
ADHD Now Danny Buckley ADHD Assessment Autism Diagnosis Ireland Healthcare
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