In the 1950s and early 1960s, the National Library carried out a project to microfilm the surviving Catholic parish registers of the entire island. Out of 1,153 sets of registers this project covered 1,066. Among the parishes whose records it does not include are:

And the Dublin city and county parishes of:

Almost all of these appear to have registers earlier than 1880 in local custody. In addition, the parishes of St John's (Sligo town), Cappawhite (County Tipperary) and Waterford city have registers held locally which are fuller than those microfilmed by the Library.

Not all of the microfilmed registers in the Library are available to the public; permission for public research has not been granted by the Bishop of Kerry. In the case of parishes in this diocese, it is necessary to obtain written permission from the diocesan office before the Library can allow access to the records. This permission is usually faxed through on the spot.

In addition, no records for the diocese of Cashel and Emly are available for research, the Archbishop having closed them in order to oblige researchers to go through the Tipperary family history research. They carry out commissioned research on indexes created in the 1970s and 1980s.

A separate microfilming project was carried out by the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland for the six counties under its jurisdiction. The results are generally identical to the National Library copies, although in some cases PRONI has used a later cut-off date.

The LDS Church also has an extensive collection of Catholic parish register microfilms, made up partly of copies of some of the National Library films and partly of material microfilmed by the Church itself. Of the 1,153 parishes in the country, the LDS library has records of 398.

Apart from research in the original records, or microfilm copies, one other access route exists to the information recorded in parish registers. This is through the network of local heritage centres that have spread throughout the country since c. 1980. These are engaged, as part of the Irish Genealogical Project, in indexing and computerising all of the surviving parish records for the country. Over 75% of all Catholic records are indexed. These records are not directly accessible to the public, but the centres do carry out commissioned research.

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