Checking a business by county
Every register on this site is national. There is no Cork register of electricians and no Galway register of estate agents, and a business does not become harder to check because it is in Leitrim.
That is worth saying plainly, because business directories have trained people to start by picking a county. For verification you do not need to. You start with the trade, not the place.
Registers you can filter by county
Location still helps when you are trying to find someone rather than check them, and several of the registers let you narrow by county directly.
- Approved Driving Instructors has a county filter, and instructors list every county they cover rather than just the one they live in
- Private Security Authority contractors shows county against each licensed alarm, CCTV and locksmith contractor
- Registered Gas Installers filters by county and by the category of gas work
- Licensed property services providers lists the address and county of every licensed estate and letting agent
- SEAI registered contractors can be narrowed to those working in your area
The register index has the full list, including the ones with no location filter at all.
The counties
The registers above cover the Republic. Several of the bodies, and several of the professions, operate on a thirty two county basis, so it is worth knowing which side of that line your question falls on.
Republic of Ireland: Carlow, Cavan, Clare, Cork, Donegal, Dublin, Galway, Kerry, Kildare, Kilkenny, Laois, Leitrim, Limerick, Longford, Louth, Mayo, Meath, Monaghan, Offaly, Roscommon, Sligo, Tipperary, Waterford, Westmeath, Wexford, Wicklow.
Northern Ireland: Antrim, Armagh, Down, Fermanagh, Derry, Tyrone.
Where the border matters
For most of these registers it matters a lot. Safe Electric, the Registered Gas Installer scheme, the PSRA, the Private Security Authority and the RSA are all authorities of the Republic and their registers stop at the border. A contractor based in Newry doing work in Dundalk is a real and common situation, and the register that covers them may be the Northern Ireland or UK equivalent rather than the one linked here.
Some bodies genuinely are all island. The Church of Ireland, the Presbyterian Church in Ireland and the Methodist Church in Ireland are organised across the whole island, as is the Catholic Church. Several professional institutes are too.
If you are hiring across the border, check which jurisdiction’s register applies before concluding that someone is unregistered. Absence from a Republic register does not mean much if they are licensed in the other one.
Checked . Registers move and bodies get renamed. If a link here is dead, the register almost certainly still exists somewhere else on the same organisation's site.