Garda vetting: timing, validity, and the transfer myth

Vetting has to be completed before a person is appointed or assigned to a role involving necessary and regular access to or contact with children — not started before, completed after. Tusla's 2026 guidance is direct about this: relevant employees, contractors, and unpaid workers all need vetting completed before appointment or assignment, with no informal "they can start while it's processing" exception.

Garda vetting doesn't travel with a person between employers. Tusla states plainly that vetting cannot be transferred from a previous organisation — a clean disclosure from someone's last crèche is not evidence for this one, however recent it is.

Validity has a clock too: three years from the date of issue, per Tusla's Spring 2026 update, with re-vetting expected to start at least 12 weeks before expiry — early enough that a lapse doesn't become the reason someone can't be rostered.

International vetting adds a second layer for anyone who's lived outside Ireland: police clearance from the relevant country, with the specifics depending on age, country, and length of residence, and any documentation not already in English or Irish translated by a certified translator and kept on file.

This is exactly the kind of rule that's easy to state and hard to enforce operationally, which is why Bloomffy makes it a hard block rather than a reminder: assigning a staff member to a room roster is blocked outright if Garda vetting isn't current, or if their staff-credentials record is incomplete — the same completeness check the Tusla staff-files dashboard card uses. It's one of the only places in the app that behaves like a gate rather than an alert, on purpose, because a lapsed vetting record isn't the kind of thing that should be discoverable after the fact.