In a move to protect children, teachers must be vetted from this September by the gardai to ensure they have not committed any offences which would make them unsuitable to work with minors.

But the council, which regulates the teaching profession and will also process vetting applications to the gardai, has decided that because of the practical difficulties of vetting all 55,000 teachers in the country by this autumn, it will only vet an estimated 2,500 recent teaching graduates for the coming school year.

The Garda Vetting Unit has told the council that it can only assess 5,000 teachers a year and it will be 2012 before it has cleared all 55,000 teachers in the country.

Aine Lawlor, director of the council, said that recent graduates have "no need to be concerned" about any minor offences, such as technical motoring offences or failure to pay a TV licence. The vetting was designed to protect children in the classroom and it would have to be a serious offence to prevent somebody from teaching, she said.

But Lawlor warned that any graduate applying for a teaching job next September, or somebody returning to the job after three years out, will be asked to produce the vetting form. "If they don't, they won't be hired, " she said.

The council has advertised heavily in the teaching colleges and universities and in the national press, pointing out the need for graduates to complete the vetting applications.

Some graduates may still be unaware of the need to be cleared by the gardai, said Lawlor. If such cases are genuine, the council will recommend that the teacher be taken on by the school pending clearance by the gardai, she said.

The vetting forms require graduates to list all previous addresses, any aliases they may have used and to declare any convictions against them.

The council then sends these forms to the garda vetting unit in Thurles which returns them to the council as 'cleared' or 'rejected'.

Until the council receives the legal advice on what type of offences will stop teachers entering the classroom, it will make no judgments on the vetting results.

Instead, it will leave it up to individual schools to assess whether the teacher is suitable or not.