This paper proposes an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-assisted energy efficiency optimization algorithm to address the problem of energy efficiency (EE) degradation in high-speed rail communication systems caused by line-of-sight link blockages between base stations and trains. The joint optimization of base station beamforming and IRS phase shifts is formulated as a variable-coupled energy efficiency maximization problem, subject to the base station’s transmission power and the IRS unit’s modulus constraints. This is known to be an NP-hard problem, making it challenging to obtain the global optimal solution. To tackle the issue of optimization variable coupling, an alternating optimization is employed to decompose the original problem into two sub-problems: base station beamforming and IRS phase-shift optimization. The Dinkelbach method is utilized to convert the fractional objective function into a difference form; then, the successive convex approximation (SCA) algorithm is applied to transform non-convex constraints into convex ones, which are solved using CVX. The Riemann conjugate gradient (RCG) algorithm can effectively solve the difficult unit module constraint. Finally, an alternating iterative strategy is employed to converge to a suboptimal solution. Our simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm significantly enhances system efficiency with low computational complexity. Specifically, when the number of IRS reflecting elements is 64, the system’s EE is improved by approximately 12.41%, 35.26%, and 37.96% compared to the semi-definite relaxation algorithm, the random phase shift approach, and no IRS scheme, respectively.