Backdoor Routes Into Irish College Courses: The Real Alternative Paths

"Backdoor route" sounds like a loophole, but there's nothing shady about it — these are genuine, well-established pathways into third-level courses that don't run through Leaving Cert points at all. If your points didn't land you where you wanted to go, it's worth knowing these exist before assuming the door is closed.

Why these routes exist

CAO points are really just a rationing mechanism — a way to allocate limited college places when more people want a course than there are seats. They're not a measure of whether you're capable of the course. Colleges know this, which is why so many parallel entry routes exist alongside the points system. None of these are secret; they're just less well publicised than the headline CAO process.

The main routes, one by one

PLC route. Do a one-year Post Leaving Cert course, and you can apply to many CAO courses scored on your PLC results instead of your Leaving Cert points. This is one of the most common backdoor routes and works particularly well for competitive courses in nursing, business, computing and the creative arts, where PLC-linked progression agreements are common.

Tertiary degrees. A growing number of degrees have no points requirement at all — you start at a further education college and complete your studies at a university or institute of technology, joining the full degree partway through. These bypass the CAO points race entirely for the first year or two.

Mature entry. If you're 23 or older, most colleges assess you on your post-school experience and motivation rather than Leaving Cert points — sometimes with an interview, sometimes a portfolio. The catch is the CAO deadline for mature applicants is 1 February, considerably earlier than the standard deadline, so this route needs planning well in advance.

HEAR and DARE. The Higher Education Access Route and Disability Access Route offer reduced points offers — genuinely below the published cut-off — for students from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds (HEAR) or with a disability (DARE). Both require a separate CAO application supplement and supporting documentation, so they need to be applied for on time, not requested after results.

Access and foundation courses. Many colleges run their own preparatory year, designed to bring students up to entry standard for a specific degree or faculty, with a guaranteed or near-guaranteed progression route into the full degree afterwards.

Ladder progression. Start at Level 6 (higher certificate) or Level 7 (ordinary degree) — both requiring meaningfully fewer points than the equivalent Level 8 honours degree — then progress ("ladder up") into the honours degree once you've completed the lower level. It takes an extra year overall but the entry bar is much lower.

Advanced entry. If you already hold a Level 6 or 7 qualification, some colleges let you apply directly (outside the CAO) for second- or even third-year entry into a related honours degree, recognising the study you've already done.

Part-time, online and Springboard+. A wide range of part-time and online degree and certificate programmes — many through Springboard+ — carry no points requirement whatsoever, particularly in areas like ICT, business and healthcare support.

How to find the specific route for your course

The routes above vary a lot by course and college — which PLCs feed into which degrees, which colleges run access programmes, which Level 6/7 courses ladder into which honours degrees. Rather than trying to research each college's website individually, CourseCompass's backdoor routes tool maps this out directly: it currently tracks 2,499 routes into 1,009 CAO courses, including 216 PLC courses mapped to the specific degrees they open up. Searching your target course there is a faster way to see exactly which of the routes above actually applies to you.

The honest caveat

These routes are real, but none of them are a free pass — a PLC route still means a genuine year of study and a strong PLC result; mature entry still means demonstrating real motivation and, often, an interview; HEAR and DARE have real eligibility criteria and documentation requirements. Think of these as legitimate alternative doors, not shortcuts around the work. If your first-choice course isn't open to you through points this year, one of these routes is very often a realistic way to get there anyway — just on a different timeline.