Ireland Has Regulators for Psychologists and Psychotherapists. It Has No Registers.

Two of CORU's twelve registration boards have existed for years and have never opened a register. The Psychologists Registration Board was established on 21 July 2017. The Counsellors and Psychotherapists Registration Board followed on 27 February 2019.

Neither register is open. Neither title is protected. Which means that today, in Ireland, anyone may call themselves a psychologist, a counsellor or a psychotherapist.

That is about to change for psychologists, and the timetable is now specific enough to plan around.

The psychology timetable, and the unusual shape of it

CORU states that the opening of the first three registers is now expected in 2027.

Note the plural. Psychology is not being regulated through one register. Phase One is three separate registers — clinical psychology, counselling psychology and educational psychology. Phase Two is a single Psychologists Register covering all other psychology specialisms.

That structure matters more than the date. If you practise in one of the three Phase One specialisms, you are in the first wave and the standards that will govern you are being drafted now. If you practise in any other area of psychology — occupational, forensic, health, neuropsychology, sport — you are in Phase Two, and CORU has published no timetable for it.

The nearest thing to a date you can act on is the consultation. CORU anticipates being in a position to open a public stakeholder consultation on draft standards during Autumn 2026. If you are a psychologist in Ireland, or you employ them, that consultation is the single most useful thing in this post: it is the point at which the qualification and competence standards for your register become visible and contestable.

CORU has been engaging ahead of it, with activity in late Autumn 2025, Spring 2026 and an online session in June 2026.

Why it has taken this long

The board was established in 2017 and the register is now expected a decade later. CORU's stated reason is that technical amendments to the Health and Social Care Professionals Act 2005 are needed before the registers can open.

That is a legislative dependency, not an administrative delay, and it is worth understanding because it affects how much confidence to place in the 2027 expectation. CORU cannot open these registers by deciding to; the enabling legislation has to be amended first. Anyone planning a qualification purchase around a 2027 opening should treat that date as an expectation rather than a commitment.

Counselling and psychotherapy: a board, and nothing else

The Counsellors and Psychotherapists Registration Board has existed since February 2019, and CORU states no expected date for its register on its own board pages. Not a delayed date. No date.

We are not going to speculate about one. What we can say is that two titles with large working populations in Ireland remain entirely unprotected, with a statutory regulator in place and no register behind it.

The contrast with the UK is instructive here, because the UK took a different route to the same problem. There, counselling and psychotherapy are also unregulated in the statutory sense, and the gap is filled by accredited registers overseen by the Professional Standards Authority — a voluntary system with a quality-assurance layer rather than a statutory one. Our guide to counselling and psychotherapy regulation and the PSA accredited registers sets out how that works and what it does and does not guarantee.

Ireland has chosen statutory regulation and has not yet delivered it. The UK has chosen not to regulate and has built a voluntary alternative. Both leave a client unable to rely on a protected title, by different routes.

Two professions on the list with no board at all

Further down the queue, CORU's list of professions still to be regulated includes clinical biochemists and orthoptists, and names no registration board for either.

That is a meaningfully earlier stage than psychology. A designated profession with no board has no standards in draft, no consultation scheduled and no register in prospect. If you are an orthoptist in Ireland, the practical position is that your UK counterparts have been HCPC-regulated for years and you have no Irish register to join.

What the ten open registers actually look like

For context on where the two unopened boards sit, here is the shape of the rest. CORU's ten open registers held 32,332 registrants in the first half of 2025.

The largest are physiotherapists at 6,676, social workers at 5,757, occupational therapists at 3,900, radiographers at 3,694 and medical scientists at 3,358. Then speech and language therapists at 2,561, social care workers at 2,335, dietitians at 1,652, optometrists at 1,057, radiation therapists at 584, podiatrists at 532, and dispensing opticians at 166 general plus 60 in contact lenses.

The pattern across every board has been the same: the register opens, a transitional period runs, and then the title becomes protected — usually two years later. Social workers opened in 2011 and were protected in 2013. Radiographers and radiation therapists opened in 2013, protected 2015. Dietitians and speech and language therapists opened in 2014, protected 2016. Occupational therapists 2015 then 2017. Physiotherapists 2016 then 2018. Medical scientists 2019 then 2021. Podiatrists 2021 then 2023.

The most recent is the one to watch as the template, because it is still fresh: the Social Care Workers register opened on 30 November 2023 and the transitional period has now closed. Our guide to CORU CPD for social care workers covers that register and its first audit cycle.

One accuracy note on that: CORU's own pages give two different dates for when the social care worker title became protected — the board page says 30 November 2025 and other CORU pages say 1 December 2025. It is a one-day discrepancy in CORU's own material, so if the exact date matters to you legally, confirm it with CORU directly rather than relying on a published summary.

What registration will actually require

If you are a psychologist preparing for 2027, the CPD obligation is already knowable, because CORU applies the same figure across every board.

Thirty CPD credits in every twelve-month period. One hour of new or enhanced learning equals one credit, and fractions may be claimed — fifteen minutes is 0.25 of a credit. Surplus credits cannot be carried forward into the next period.

That last rule catches people who are used to the UK systems. There is no banking ahead. A year in which you do sixty credits does not buy you a quiet year afterwards.

What does differ by board is not the credit figure but the audit period and audit date. Most boards run a twenty-four-month audit period in which the registrant must demonstrate thirty credits in each twelve-month period within it. The social care workers board is the exception, running a twelve-month first audit period with its first audit commencing 1 December 2026.

Deferral is available on request and decided case by case. Workload is explicitly not a sufficient reason. For maternity leave, a career break or statutory leave, deferral can be requested where more than six months of that leave fell within an audit period.

For how the register, the standards and the audit fit together across all the boards, see our guide to CORU and the Health and Social Care Professionals Act.

What to do now

If you are a clinical, counselling or educational psychologist in Ireland: you are in the first wave. Watch for the Autumn 2026 consultation and respond to it — the standards drafted there will set your qualification and competence requirements. Start keeping a CPD record on the thirty-credit model now, even though nothing yet requires it, because the first audit period will begin shortly after the register opens and reconstructing a year retrospectively is harder than logging it.

If you work in any other psychology specialism: you are in Phase Two with no published timetable. The Phase One standards will still be the best available signal of what Phase Two will look like, so the consultation is worth reading even though it is not about your register.

If you are a counsellor or psychotherapist: there is no date, and we are not going to invent one. In the meantime the practical substitute for a protected title is accredited membership of a recognised professional body, which is what clients and employers in both jurisdictions currently use as a proxy.

If you employ any of these professions: the thing to prepare for is the transitional period rather than the register opening. On every board so far, the two years between opening and title protection is when existing staff have to get registered, and it is when employers discover that someone's qualification route does not map onto the new standards. That is a workforce planning problem, and the lead time on solving it is longer than two years.