How to tell the official Irish NARIC source from anything else — the address people remember no longer resolves

NARIC Ireland is not a separate organisation with its own website. QQI states it in one line: “The National Academic Recognition Information Centre of Ireland (NARIC Ireland), is hosted by QQI.” Everything official flows from qqi.ie. If you did not arrive from there, you do not yet know where you are.

That matters more than usual here for one reason: the address most guides, forum posts and older university pages still print for Irish NARIC has stopped resolving.

The verified fact

On 3 September 2026 we queried naricireland.ie and www.naricireland.ie against a public DNS resolver. Both returned NXDOMAIN — status 3, no address record, no redirect. A local lookup returned the same failure. That is not a site being slow or a page having moved; it is a name that does not currently point anywhere.

The database QQI actually links to is served from a QQI subdomain, qsearch.qqi.ie, reached from the “Recognition of foreign qualifications” page on qqi.ie.

We are stating what the DNS returned on one day, from one machine and one public resolver. Domain registrations change. The point is not that a particular name is permanently gone; it is that a remembered address is not a source of authority, and this one has already stopped working.

Why free changes the incentive

A UK ENIC Statement of Comparability is a paid product, which gives copycat sites an obvious business model. The Irish document is free. That removes the fee-skimming motive but leaves two others: sites that republish QQI’s material to earn advertising or referral revenue, and sites that use a NARIC-sounding name to sell an unrelated paid “evaluation”.

Both are easier to spot than a payment page, because the tell is structural rather than financial.

Four checks that do not depend on the site’s own claims

1. Start at qqi.ie, never at a search result. Type qqi.ie yourself, then follow “Recognition of foreign qualifications” from the site’s own navigation. Any legitimate route to the database ends there. This single habit makes the other three checks redundant most of the time.

2. The download is free and there is no application. QQI’s design is: search by country, read the published statement, download it. There is no form, no fee and no queue for a listed qualification. A site that asks you to pay, to create an account, or to upload your transcript in order to get a comparability statement is not running QQI’s service. QQI publishes exactly one route that involves submitting anything, and it is for qualifications that are not in the database — its award-queries form.

3. The statement is generic, and any honest source will say so. QQI states it repeatedly: “comparability statements are generic and non-personalised”, and “NARIC Ireland does not provide personalised statements.” A page offering you a personalised Irish NARIC statement is describing a product QQI says does not exist. Likewise QQI’s disclaimer — “a comparability statement only provides advice and is not a legal document” — is unflattering to a sales page, so it tends to be the first thing dropped.

4. Check what it says about regulated professions. QQI’s line is: “We do not comment on professional awards, regulated professions, licences to practice or agreements made between different sectors of industry from one or more countries.” A site implying that an Irish NARIC statement will let you register as a nurse, teacher, architect or solicitor has contradicted the source it claims to be. What actually decides those is set out at an Irish NARIC statement does not register you.

Positive markers: what the real service publishes that a copy usually will not

The four checks above are exclusions. These are the opposite — things QQI itself publishes, which are easy to verify and awkward to fake.

A guide in ten languages, free. QQI publishes “Guide to using the NARIC Ireland database” in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Gaeilge, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Ukrainian, each as a PDF hosted on qqi.ie. If you are being charged for help using the database, that help already exists in your language at no cost.

Country “rough guides” for particular cohorts. QQI publishes free PDF guides to Ukrainian, Syrian and Afghan qualifications “in the context of the Irish National Framework of Qualifications”, describing them as support for “recruiters, guidance personnel, information officers, employers, education and training providers, schools, Institutions, competent authorities, and credential evaluators”. QQI attaches its own caveat to them, which is itself a marker of the genuine source: “Recognition decisions are not made by NARIC Ireland.”

A published statistics report. QQI publishes NARIC Ireland statistics on the use of the recognition service. Bodies that publish their own usage data are not usually the ones selling you a certificate.

Named contact routes. QQI’s site publishes a query service and a customer-relations contact, along with its registered address in Dublin 2 and a phone number, in the footer of every page. A recognition service with no physical address and no named complaints route is not a national authority.

An independent listing. QQI states that “NARIC Ireland is a member of ENIC-NARIC, the European Network of Information Centres-National Academic Recognition Information Centres”, and links to that network’s own site. The network publishes which body is the official centre for each country, which lets you check Ireland’s from outside Ireland’s own web estate.

The name confusion, which is real and not anyone’s fault

Three separate things share vocabulary:

• NARIC Ireland — the Irish national centre, hosted by QQI, issuing free generic comparability statements against the Irish NFQ.
• UK ENIC — the UK centre, formerly called UK NARIC, managed by Ecctis for the UK Department for Education, issuing paid personalised statements against the UK frameworks.
• The ENIC-NARIC Networks — the international network both belong to, which publishes country information but does not itself evaluate individual qualifications.

Because the UK body was called NARIC until it was renamed, a large volume of older material, including university guidance, uses “NARIC” to mean the UK service. If a page says NARIC and quotes a fee in pounds, it is describing the UK body. The two are compared at UK ENIC and NARIC Ireland are not the same service, and which one to approach first at applying to both Ireland and the UK.

If you have already paid someone

Two things are worth separating. Paying a third party for a document that QQI gives away is a loss but not necessarily a scam — some agents charge a service fee for doing the lookup. Paying for a “recognition” or “equivalence certificate” that claims standing with an Irish employer or regulator is a different matter, because QQI is explicit that no such standing attaches even to its own statement.

Either way the practical next step is the same: go to qqi.ie, do the free lookup yourself, and take the question of what document is actually required to the body that will decide.

What this page does not do

It does not name or accuse any particular website. We verified the status of one domain on one date and report exactly that; we did not audit third-party sites, and we make no claim about who operates any of them. The four checks above are written so you do not have to rely on anyone’s list, including ours.

It also does not tell you what your qualification compares to. Only the database can, and it is free.

DNS lookups and all quotations were made on 3 September 2026.