Grey reg plates

Afaik, plates have to have a white retro-reflective background.

There's something to be said about filthy plates. My local Garda station has currently two cars in the staff carpark with (outside the region) filthy unreadable plates. The cars are clean, well, cleaner than the plates. So, if they're doing it there's got to be merit in it.

They really don't look good. They look (very) cheap and (exceptionally) tacky and (extremely) nasty, just like the German plate phase did.

Any and all "my plates look better this way" attempts look cheap and tacky and nasty. All of them. The "4D" ones are probably the worst however.

Any Guard not pulling you for yellow rears isn't doing their job properly.

Even legal plates can be difficult. The design first of all is a failure from the government. WHY does a country this small need 9- (potentially 10-) character plates? Also I find it difficult from a bit of a distance to see if a car has for example a MH or a WH plate. Mind if that really is the problem then there's still only two cars to investigate and probably quickly enough to identify which one it is in the event of a hit-and-run, but still.

Even these are not legal, I think. The characters don't seem to be 36mm wide: https://eireplates.com/product/nct-standard-black-irish-font-on-white-plate-pair

And my wife's car has plates with the same font as this one: https://licenseplatemania.com/fotos/ierland/ierland85.jpg

I just measured: apart from the 1 the characters are between 33 and 34 mm wide. Still see those plates a lot though (on cars that you wouldn't expect the owners to care a whole lot about the plates) and it passed the NCT without any comments about the plates two weeks ago.

We actually bought the car from a dealer who put the plates on himself (his name is on it and on the photos in the ad the car still had plates with the "standard" font, so the condensed UK font that is most commonly used here).

That's what I'm saying about the second one. Character width of 33 (the 2) to 34mm (the 4, the M and the H), should be 36 with a tolerance of 1mm. I didn't bother with the rest, but about the width I was without measuring already pretty sure that it wasn't enough. The first one is just eye-balling, I haven't had the opportunity to actually measure one of those. I do have a photo of a car with almost the same registration as mine (first 8 characters) with these pressed plates, seems to be OK because the amount of white at the beginning and the end seems to be the same as on my plastic plates (with the "standard" font, as far as there is a standard font here), but the D for instance seems wider than on the photo in the link.

Another interesting thing actually is what I read earlier somewhere. It said that the 0 in the German font can prove problematic, because of the opening. But that's how that font is. Nowhere in the regulations does it say that the 0 has to be a closed loop, or does it?

Same would be if somebody were to use the Dutch font, where the O and the R have a gap (and the P, but that's not relevant here).

Something else that I've been wondering: I've seen plates where the county name has been applied by means of a sticker, instead of being imprinted in the plate itself. Is that a legal thing or should it really have been part of the plate? And how about the EU-band?