# Ireland number plate: Standard 1987

> The Ireland standard 1987 number plate: format 99 LL 9999, 1987 to 1990, car, van, truck, bus, and motorcycle, cited to Revenue Commissioners.

Page: https://vehiclesdb.com/license-plates/ireland/standard-1987 · Markdown version of the HTML page, which is canonical. Site map: https://vehiclesdb.com/llms.txt · Terms of use: https://vehiclesdb.com/legal/terms

Part of [Ireland license plates](https://vehiclesdb.com/license-plates/ireland) (7 registration series).

![Ireland license plate, Standard 1987 (1987 to 1990)](https://vehiclesdb.com/plates/ie/ie-standard-1987/ireland-license-plate-standard-1987.svg)

| Fact | Value |
|---|---|
| Format | `99 LL 9999` (L is any letter, 9 any digit) |
| Years | 1987–1990 |
| Class | standard |
| Issued for | car, van, truck, bus, motorcycle |
| Colours | background #FFFFFF; characters #000000 |
| Rear plate differs from the front | no |
| Checking a registration | The format above follows the issuing rules: a registration that fits it is one this series could have issued. |
| Series id | `ie-standard-1987` (https://vehiclesdb.com/license-plates/ireland/standard-1987) |

Sources:

- [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 Diagrams 5-8 and paras. 1-9. Sealed 19-12-1986.](https://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/1986/si/441/made/en/print)
- [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 ... shall be assigned to vehicles first registered on or after the 1st day of January, 1987'. Sealed 20-12-1986.](https://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/1986/si/445/made/en/print)
- [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)

## 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.

## Before and after

| Relation | Series | Years |
|---|---|---|
| It replaced | [Index mark pre-1987](https://vehiclesdb.com/license-plates/ireland/index-mark-pre1987) | 1921 to 1987 |
| Replaced by | [Standard 1991](https://vehiclesdb.com/license-plates/ireland/standard-1991) | documented since 1991 |

## Other standard plates here

- [Standard 2013](https://vehiclesdb.com/license-plates/ireland/standard-2013) (documented since 2013)
- [Standard 1991](https://vehiclesdb.com/license-plates/ireland/standard-1991) (documented since 1991)
- [Index mark pre-1987](https://vehiclesdb.com/license-plates/ireland/index-mark-pre1987) (1921 to 1987)

## Use it

- Plate image (SVG): https://vehiclesdb.com/plates/ie/ie-standard-1987.svg
- Make it with your own text: https://vehiclesdb.com/license-plate-generator/ireland?series=ie-standard-1987
- API: `GET https://vehiclesdb.com/api/v1/plates/ie` returns this series as the entry with `"id": "ie-standard-1987"` (https://vehiclesdb.com/api)

---

Open data, CC BY 4.0: reuse it with a visible credit to VehiclesDB and a link (https://vehiclesdb.com/legal/attribution). Plate images show sample serials and are not open data (https://vehiclesdb.com/legal/image-license). Dataset commit db0ec0a: https://github.com/vehiclesdb/vehiclesdb