VehiclesDB

Ireland number plate: Standard 1987

Retired 1987 to 1990. Standard plates for car, van, truck, bus, and motorcycle, issued by Revenue Commissioners. One of 7 Ireland number plates.

Ireland license plate, Standard 1987 (1987 to 1990)
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Format, years and the law

Format
99 LL 9999 (L is any letter, 9 any digit)

The format above follows the issuing rules: a registration that fits it is one this series could have issued.

Years issued
1987 to 1990. No longer issued.
Vehicle class
Standard: the default series issued to private road vehicles. Issued for car, van, truck, bus, and motorcycle.
Colours
Characters #000000 Background #FFFFFF
About this plate
THE FIRST YEAR-COUNTY PLATE, and it looks almost nothing like the plate people picture when they think of Ireland: white reflective, black characters at least 81 mm tall, groups separated by a wide SPACE, and no EU band, no black border and no Irish county name anywhere on it. It ran for exactly four years. START DATE PRECISION: both halves of the reform are dated to 1 January 1987 by their own instruments, and both were sealed in the week before Christmas 1986 (the 19th and the 20th), which is the kind of gap that produces "1986" in secondary sources. The system dates from 1987; the instruments date from 1986.
About the format
The 1986 instrument's own diagrams are the evidence for the shape and they are printed in the text: "87 D 99999" (Diagram No. 6, one-letter mark) and "87 CW 9999" (Diagram No. 8, two-letter mark), with Diagrams No. 5 and No. 7 as the two-line versions. Digit widths are illustrative; no instrument fixes them.
Separators
SPACE, NOT HYPHEN, and this is the whole difference between an Irish plate of 1988 and one of 1991. Third Schedule Part II para. 7(c) fixes only a proportional gap: "the space between the index mark and adjoining figures shall be three times the space between the nearest part of adjoining figures", with para. 7(a) setting the base gap at 8 mm. No glyph is prescribed anywhere in Part II.

Legal basis and sources

  1. S.I. No. 441 of 1986: art. 1(3) 'These Regulations shall come into operation on the 1st day of January, 1987'; art. 2(c) substituting art. 25(3) with the year numerals; art. 2(e) inserting Third Schedule PART II with... https://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/1986/si/441/made/en/print
  2. S.I. No. 445 of 1986: the matching index-mark half, new art. 3, 'the index marks in Part I ... shall not be assigned to vehicles first registered on or after the 1st day of January, 1987 and the index marks in Part II... https://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/1986/si/445/made/en/print
  3. S.I. No. 287 of 1990 art. 3(b): inserts into Part II's heading 'but not later than the 31st day of December, 1990', the instrument that CLOSES this series, dated by its own words. https://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/1990/si/287/made/en/print

Before and after

Ireland license plate, Index mark pre-1987 (1921 to 1987) It replaced Index mark pre-1987 1921 to 1987 Ireland license plate, Standard 1991 (documented since 1991) Replaced by Standard 1991 documented since 1991

This plate in your app

The series id is ie-standard-1987. 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-standard-1987")'
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