Which CORU board covers your profession — and why five professions have no open register, so no recognition process to apply to

CORU regulates health and social care professions in Ireland one profession at a time, and the rollout is still running. If your profession’s register has not opened, there is no application for you to make and no body to assess your overseas qualification — not because you were refused, but because the machinery does not exist yet.

CORU states the rule that produces this in its recognition policy:

“On the day a register opens for a designated profession, the Registration Board becomes the Competent Authority for that profession under the Directive.”

Competent Authority status, and with it the power to recognise an overseas qualification, arrives on the day the register opens. Not on the day the Board is appointed.

The professions with open registers

CORU’s FAQ page lists the professions for which registers are currently open:

Dietitians, Medical Scientists, Occupational Therapists, Optometrists and Dispensing Opticians, Physiotherapists, Podiatrists, Radiographers and Radiation Therapists, Social Workers, Speech and Language Therapists, and Social Care Workers.

It closes the list with one sentence: “Registers for the other professions will follow on a phased basis.”

The professions still waiting

CORU’s “What is CORU” page names them under the heading The professions soon to be regulated are:

Psychologists, Counsellors, Psychotherapists, Clinical Biochemists, Orthoptists.

Two things are worth separating within that list, because they are at different stages.

Psychologists, Counsellors and Psychotherapists have Registration Boards. CORU publishes board pages, member lists and standards work for both. The Counsellors and Psychotherapists Registration Board’s own page records that “The Minister for Health, Simon Harris TD, confirmed on 27 February 2019 the establishment of and appointment of members to the Counsellors and Psychotherapists Registration Board”. A board has existed for years; the register has not opened.

Clinical Biochemists and Orthoptists have neither. CORU’s Registration Boards section publishes pages for twelve boards, and neither of these professions is among them. CORU does not publish an opening date for any of the five.

If you are in one of these five professions, the practical consequence is the same either way: CORU publishes no route by which your overseas qualification can be recognised today, because no Board is yet the Competent Authority for it. Whether the title is protected, and what you may call yourself in the meantime, is a separate legal question you should take to CORU directly rather than infer from this page.

CORU’s own pages give three different counts

This is not a criticism so much as a warning against relying on any single number you read anywhere, including in an agent’s summary. Read on 3 September 2026:

• The Registration Boards section of the site publishes pages for twelve boards.
• The FAQ states: “CORU is made up of the Health and Social Care Professionals Council and 14 Registration Boards, one for each profession named in our Act.”
• The same FAQ describes the Council as having “one member representing each of the 15 registered professions”.
• The What is CORU page names thirteen professions as currently regulated and five more as soon to be regulated.

Part of the spread is explained by professions being grouped into one board — the Optical Registration Board covers optometrists and dispensing opticians; one board covers radiographers and radiation therapists; one covers counsellors and psychotherapists. Part is explained by protected-title variants: the currently-regulated list includes “Physical Therapists” and “Podiatrists/Chiropodists” alongside “Physiotherapists”.

The reliable question is not how many boards exist. It is whether the register for your profession is open, and CORU answers that in one list on its FAQ page.

What an open register does and does not mean

An open register means there is a Competent Authority that will assess your overseas qualification against the Standards of Proficiency for the profession. It does not mean the assessment is quick or that the outcome is favourable. What happens when assessors find substantial differences is set out at CORU found substantial differences in your qualification.

It also does not mean the process is stable. CORU has changed the shape of assessment for at least one profession. Its page for international medical scientists states: “From 1st August the assessment of Medical Scientists’ international qualifications will change from a paper-based assessment to the requirement to complete an in-person assessment called the Test of Professional Competence” — with the consequence, in CORU’s words, that “you are no longer required to provide details of your qualification, but you will be required to provide evidence of eligibility to practice your profession in your home state, along with evidence of proficiency in the English language before you can process to take the ToPC.” The page names a test date of Saturday 14 November 2026, held at the Academy of Clinical Science and Laboratory Medicine in Dublin, with the assessment fee included in the application fee. The page does not state the year of the “1st August” change.

For a medical scientist that is a material shift: the qualification assessment is replaced by an examination. Check the profession-specific page, not the general one, before assuming your route looks like anyone else’s.

Transitional periods close, and they do not reopen

When a register opens, CORU runs a time-limited transitional route for people already practising, then shuts it. Its FAQ records the physiotherapy example: “The Register of Physiotherapists opened on 30 September 2016. The two-year transitional period (known as grand parenting) provided for by Section 91 of the Health and Social Care Professionals Act 2005 Act (as amended) ended on 30 September 2018 … The title ‘Physiotherapist’ became a legally protected professional title upon the close of the grand parenting period.”

If your profession’s register opens while you are in Ireland working in the field, the transitional window is a two-year event with a hard end date. It is worth knowing that it exists before it opens, because nobody will remind you afterwards.

What to do

1. Check the FAQ list of open registers for your exact profession title, not a similar one.
2. If it is open, go to the profession-specific international-applicant page rather than the general one — at least one profession’s route has changed shape.
3. If it is not open, ask CORU directly what the position is for your profession, in writing. There is no published date, and a general enquiry to a Registration Board that is not yet a Competent Authority will not produce a recognition decision.
4. Do not treat an academic comparability statement as a substitute. QQI says plainly that it “does not comment on … regulated professions” — see an Irish NARIC statement does not register you.
5. If you also hold, or are considering, UK registration in an allied health profession, the two regulators handle the same degree differently — see CORU and the HCPC assess the same degree.

What this page does not do

It does not predict when any register will open. CORU publishes no dates for the five outstanding professions and we found none.

It does not tell you whether you may work, or under what title, while your profession is unregulated. That is a legal question about protected titles and employment, not an education question, and it belongs to CORU and to your employer.

It contains no clinical content. Everything above is administrative: which body exists, what it can decide, and when.

All counts and quotations were read from CORU’s own pages on 3 September 2026, and CORU revises them.