What tends to happen elsewhere is that you'd have a superroute for the "named route" (see for example https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/16327216 ) which has only relations as components - in my example https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/78028 (which is also a member of a European route) and https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/16327210 (which isn't part of anything else).
Northern Ireland has overcomplicated things a bit because there is https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/1015237 (a collection of all sorts) which contains various ones including Ulster Way (918951), which is contains a mixture of ways and relations.
It'd make it much easier if superroutes were created for the main named routes and the ways moved into them - that way the SRs for this and e.g. the Lecale Way would be much easier to process.
A challenge to do in iD, though...