VehiclesDB

Ireland number plate: Index mark pre-1987

Retired 1921 to 1987. Standard plates for car, van, truck, bus, and motorcycle, issued by Revenue Commissioners. One of 7 Ireland number plates.

Ireland license plate, Index mark pre-1987 (1921 to 1987), sample QZM 7436
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Format, years and the law

Format
LLL 9999, for example QZM 7436 (L is any letter, 9 any digit)

The format above is broad: a registration that fits it has the right shape, which does not show that this series issued it.

Years issued
1921 to 1987. No longer issued.
Vehicle class
Standard: the default series issued to private road vehicles. Issued for car, van, truck, bus, and motorcycle.
Colours
Characters #FFFFFF Background #000000
About this plate
THE START DATE IS A DELIBERATE UNDER-CLAIM AND IS FLAGGED AS ONE. 1921 is the date the Roads Act 1920 regime takes the scheme over, fixed by that Act's own proviso ("the first day of January, nineteen hundred and twenty-one"); marks of exactly this shape were being assigned earlier under s. 2 of the Motor Car Act 1903, which the 1920 Act names and preserves. END DATE, by contrast, is exact to the day: 1 January 1987, by S.I. 445/1986 art. 3. Plates already issued were never recalled, the same explanatory note says so, so pre-1987 marks remained on Irish roads for decades afterwards and remain lawful today.
Region code notes
The two mark sets are disjoint and a pre-1987 mark run through the modern table gives a confidently wrong county. The historic table ships the 1958 base list plus the three-letter expansion RULE rather than an exhaustive merge of fifteen instruments; a mark that resolves through neither must be returned as unresolved, not as invalid.
How numbers are issued
Sequential within an index mark, and when a mark ran out the Minister allotted the authority another by regulation, which is why Dublin holds eighty-odd marks and Carlow started with one. The three-letter marks are a single leading letter prefixed to an existing two-letter stem (AIC..ZIC on Carlow's IC), so the letters carry no year information but DO carry a rough vintage, since an authority's marks were exhausted in the order they were allotted.
About the format
Two independent reasons. SECOND, the index mark is one, two or three letters drawn from an enumerated list that grew through fifteen instruments, and the number has no prescribed width at all.
Separators
A GAP, never a glyph. S.I. 311/1982 Third Schedule para. 7(b) requires only "that the index mark appears as a separate unit from the registration number", and para. 8 sets the minimum gap at 38 mm on one-line layouts.

Legal basis and sources

  1. Roads Act 1920 s. 6(1): the county council 'shall assign a separate number to every vehicle registered with them, and a mark indicating the registered number of the vehicle and the council with which the vehicle is... https://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/1920/act/72/enacted/en/print
  2. S.I. No. 311 of 1982, Road Vehicles (Registration and Licensing) Regulations, 1982: art. 1(2) in operation 01-02-1983; art. 25(3) the mark's composition; Third Schedule paras. 1-9 the plate spec quoted above. https://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/1982/si/311/made/en/print
  3. S.I. No. 14 of 1958, Road Vehicles (Index Marks) Regulations, 1958: the consolidated mark list, in operation 01-02-1958; its explanatory note records that it replaced 'a number of orders (now revoked)'. https://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/1958/si/14/made/en/print
  4. S.I. No. 445 of 1986 art. 3: the marks in Part I 'shall not be assigned to vehicles first registered on or after the 1st day of January, 1987', the instrument that ends the era, and its explanatory note adds 'Index... https://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/1986/si/445/made/en/print

Before and after

Ireland license plate, Standard 1987 (1987 to 1990) Replaced by Standard 1987 1987 to 1990

This plate in your app

The series id is ie-index-mark-pre1987. The API returns its format, validation, colours and designs with the rest of Ireland's series:

curl -s https://vehiclesdb.com/api/v1/plates/ie \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $VEHICLESDB_API_KEY" \
  | jq '.series[] | select(.id == "ie-index-mark-pre1987")'
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