2024 Assistant Principal in Civil Service

I don't know. Although I have just been shortlisted after another batch of application forms was reviewed. There's hope yet!

When you say just been shortlisted, do you mean in the last few weeks or more recently? PAS e-mailed me on 09/03 to say they had shortlisted up to 526 on the open and 340 on the interd and on 10/03 they said that that was the final batch with no further plans to shortlist for the competition.

Frustrating, because I'm 555 on the open and 361 on the interd. Mind you, I don't think I would get an interview even if I passed shortlisting at this stage.

I contacted PAS on 12/03/26 about any further shortlisting of application forms at stage 2 (open):


A shortlisting board set up by the publicjobs met from 2nd to 5th March 2026, where they examined and assessed the applications of candidates up to open 526 OOM from Dublin. Results have not yet issued to candidates, but they typically do within two weeks of the last date of assessments.

I was 400ish OOM in Stage 1. Since then, I've received email confirmation that my application has been successful at Stage 2 shortlisting and given a new merit order for Dublin Batch 3.

thanks for that! Does anyone know if 1.6 is the end and then into batch 2?

Grateful if someone could give me the email address to contact Public Jobs on to request information on panel progression for this competition please? (I'm lost since we've had our profiles and messages deleted on their platform tbh!)

aprecruitment@publicjobs.ie

whoa that's much quicker than I expected, I'm not far behind you. great info thanks

can someone explain how clearance works? If you don’t want to let your current job know about the role, can you keep them off as a reference?

Usually that reference check is the very last step in the process though, right before they assign you to a Department.

ah ok great - has anyone got a timeline of how long clearance lasts?

No I don't believe there is any way to have them change it. I know of cases where a person on both the Open and Interdepartmental turned down one of the streams and then was offered a different department when reached on the other, so for example turned down Justice on Interdepartmental but on Open got Education. But they had to wait to be reached on the second panel.

Once I returned my reference details they contacted my referees within 24 hours

Forgot to say I'm currently about 3 weeks into the Garda vetting process, having come from Batch 1.6.

FYI - I am 9 on the interD for batch 2.2 and got confirmation last Friday (24/5) there was only 3 ahead of me in the interD and 10 in the Open. Not sure if anyone else is on batch 2.2 has anything different.