Getting back to the OP's question...
Do a google search for "IAR Kickstart" plus whichever processor family you want to use. IAR doesn't talk about the Kickstart versions on their website, at least not that I've seen, so it's understandable to wonder whether it's still available.
On another note, if you're a Visual Studio user and you've never seen VisualGDB (a companion for Visual Studio), it's worth checking out. They have a lot of pre-built gcc toolchains, and it takes a lot of the pain out of setting up a gcc workflow. I used it on a project a few years ago to write my code on Windows/Visual Studio, cross-compile on a Linux build server, deploy to target hardware, and remote-debug, all from inside Visual Studio + VisualGDB.
Honestly, though, I rarely use VisualGDB (or Visual Studio, for that matter). For debugging, I mostly use a printf-style 'dlog' library that I've built over the years. It lets me dynamically change what I log by topic and log-level, using whatever log destination I have available on a given target board (memory, serial port, file, log server, etc), and you can use it on almost any processor. Once you get used to troubleshooting that way, an actual debugger starts to feel cumbersome.