Registration
marks on Number plates in the Republic of Ireland issued
since 1987 have the format YY-CC-SSSSSS where the components
are:
Since 1991,
the sole design of the plate has been based on European
standard guidelines, with a blue band to the left of
the plate containing the 12 stars of the European flag
and the country identifier IRL. The rest of the plate
has a white background with black characters. Unlike
legal requirements in most other European countries,
a standard uniform character font is not required nor
is the material from which the number plate is to be
manufactured specified. The rules simply require legible
black characters, no more than 70 mm high and 36 mm wide,
on a white reflective background. The result is that
a large variety of perfectly legal font styles may be
seen, on either pressed aluminium or acrylic plates.
Despite the rather relaxed lack of a specified font,
the hyphen between the lettering must have the dimensions
of 13mm x 10mm. Also required is the full Irish language
name of the county which must be positioned above the
identifier. Vehicle owners may be fined if the plate's
format does not meet the requirements and will automatically
fail government vehicle testing NCT which the vehicle
is required to undergo on a two-yearly basis.
A vehicle's number plate is determined when it is
first registered, the county code being taken from
the first owner's postal address. Registration remains
fixed on the one vehicle until it is de-registered
(exported, destroyed, etc), and cannot be transferred
to other vehicles.
Currently, the Revenue Commissioners, the Irish
Government agency responsible for vehicle registration,
are planning to add new codes for the administrative
counties currently sharing codes. These are expected
to be CK (County Cork), GY (County Galway), DR (Dun
Laoghaire-Rathdown), FL (Fingal), and SN (South Dublin)
respectively.
Sequence numbers may be reserved on completion of
the relevant documents and payment of a fee, although
this is rarely done due to high costs involved.
Imported used cars are registered based
on year of first registration in their country of original
registration rather than year of import.
Vehicles registered to the Irish Defence Forces have
plates with silver letters on black background. These
do not feature the Irish-language county name; in practice
all are registered in Dublin.
There are only two pre-1987 codes still used in the
Republic of Ireland.
