Ireland Coins 1928-1971

Ireland was part of the “United Kingdom” until 1922 and British coins were used. Irish coins were not introduced until 1928 and parity with the British currency was maintained until 1979.

The 1928 Coins were issued in (mostly) the same size and denominations as their British counterparts.

The designs, chosen by a committee headed by Senator William Butler Yeats were intended to be apolitical (birds, fish and animals). The obverse side of the coins featured the Irish Harp and the name “Saorstát Éireann” (Free State of Ireland) until 1937 and “Éire” (Ireland) from 1938.

Obverse

The coins were Farthing, Halfpenny, Penny, Threepence, Sixpence, Shilling, Florin and Half Crown.

Coins

The fauna featured Woodcock, Sow with piglets, Hen with chicks, Hare, Wolfhound, Bull, Salmon and Horse.

The Shilling, Florin and Half Crown were originally silver but these were replaced by a less valuable metal circa 1940s. This means that the older Shillings, Florins and Half Crowns are comparatively rare and in some cases expensive.

The Farthing is also comparatively rare as it was effectively obsolete in my lifetime. Likewise there are low mintage for all coins in some years and the 1938 Half Crown is unique and there are only two known 1938 Pennies. Thankfully, the Notional Museum has one of each.

Six of the eight coins were the same size and weight as their British counterparts. The exception was the threepence and sixpence (shown below).

Irish & British Threepence & Sixpence

British coins still circulated in the Republic of Ireland during the “parity years to 1979) but Irish coins did not circulate in Britain. As a child in Belfast in the 1950s and 1960s, I usually had both British and Irish coins in my pocket.

It is almost impossible to explain the British monetary “£ s d” (pounds, shillings and pence) in 2020.

The root was the Pound note. A pound was made up of twenty shillings (there was a Ten Shilling note). There were twelve pennies in a shilling.

So looking at the eight coins…40 sixpences made one pound. 240 pennies made one pound. 480 half pennies made a pound. Thankfully I never had to count 960 farthings to make a pound.

Britain and Ireland would go “Decimal” in February 1971. This of course simplified the Mathematics around the Pound (in Irish “Punt”) which would now be worth 100 “new” pennies. This required some planning around conversion.

The Halfpenny ceased to be legal tender on 8th September 1969.

The easiest conversion was the Shilling (1/20 of the old Pound) and Florin (1/10 of the old Pound). On 8th September 1969, these Bull and Florin designs were introduced as 5 pence and 10 pence coins. The old coins were still legal until 1993/94.

Also a 50 pence coin (half a pound) was issued on 17th February 1970, a month after the Half Crown was withdrawn.

The Penny, Threepence and Sixpence circulated alongside the new “decimal” coins, introduced in 1971 for approximately one year.

During the period from 1928 to “decimalisation”, only one commemorative coin was issued …a Ten Shillings Coin in 1966 to commemorate the 50th Anniversary of the Easter Rising.

1966 P H Pearse

I am not really a Coin collector. It is very secondary to Stamps. I reckon 172 Irish coins were issued between 1928 to 1969 and I have 125 of them. ..or 73% which is satisfactory for a non-collector.

To be clear, in preparation for Decimalisation (February 1971) some decimal coins were issued in 1969 and 1970 and the last pre-decimal coins were issued (mostly) in 1968 and the last sixpence was issued in 1969.

PostCrossing

I tried PostCrossing a few years back. What is PostCrossing?

Well it is a project that facilitates the collection and exchange of postcards. It is free to join and has 750,000 members in well over 200 countries and territories.

Over 50 million postcards have been exchanged since PostCrossing went active in 2005.

These are impressive figures.

Basically a member “A” is sent an address and logs a postcard with a unique ID (prefixed IE in the case of Ireland) on the site.Member “B” (in say ZA- South Africa) who logs the Irish card on the site and this triggers a card to be sent to “A” by “C” who is (say) in MY-Malaysia.

The problem with the 200 countries is that Russia has 100,000 members, China (75,000 members), United States of America (72,000 members) and Germany (55,000 members).

On the other hand there are less than 100 members in Kuwait, Mauritius, Panama and Armenia.

So it is not entirely about population. It is as much leisure time and economy.

The Nordic countries are interesting. Finland has 17,000 members but more populated neighbour, Sweden has less than 2,000 members. Denmark, not very different in population to Finland has less than 1,000 members.

An American friend, who is a big fan of PostCrossing and who supplied the numbers I used tells me that postage rates are higher in Finland than Denmark

Republic of Ireland has around 1,300 members.

The nature of collecting postcards is that some countries are harder to find than others. There are no members in (among others) Palau, Nauru and North Korea.

So the rare countries are at a premium.

There is I think a pyramid shape to it all. Ireland is maybe in the middle of the pyramid. Not as common as Russia, China, United States of America and Germany but more common than Kuwait, Montenegro and Peru.

In my brief time as a member, I received maybe twenty postcards and all were from major countries. There is a facility for “direct swaps” and swaps that are based on a theme (sport, flags, music etc).

One interesting dimension is that the majority of members appear to be women. It seems to be the case that Men (from Mars) collect stamps and Women (from Venus) collect postcards. Are postcards more…”social”?

PostCrossing MeetUp: Ireland

I was at a meet-up in Dublin in October last year. There are regular meet-ups and they were a very friendly group of people. Unfortunately, because of CoronaVirus, I have not been at any meetings this year.

PostCrossing MeetUps

Groups of PostCrossers often meet up and often publish their own cards. The above cards were sent to me from Poland (2018) and United States of America (2019). They are signed by the attendees.

I think any cross-over between Stamp Collectors and Postcard Collectors benefits everyone.

Postcards: Posted or Unposted?

I actually gave up collecting stamps in about 2001. I was fed up that the Irish Post Office was issuing too many stamps. And I just could not afford to keep up.

We got the Internet set up in 1998 and I think that my interest in the Internet also contributed to my disenchantment with Stamp Collecting.

In the first years of the Internet, it was so much better than the unsocial “social media” of Facebook, Twitter etc that we have today.

Inevitably this led to people in Boise, Idaho or Prattville, Alabama asking me to send them postcards.

I was happy to do so. And of course, I got American postcards in exchange. I have a lifelong interest in all things American…history, politics, music, movies, television.

So people would maybe send three or four postcards in an envelope. As they accumulated, there were constant reminders of several decades of music, movies and television, coming into my home….Music like “24 Hours from Tulsa”, “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” or “The Streets of Baltimore”.

Tulsa, Phoenix & Baltimore

Route 66

I could have Americana in my home. But there were two downsides. First off ….Storage. There are around 900 American postcards from Alabama to Wyoming and generic postcards like Wildlife and historic cards from Civil War battlefields and they are stored in about twelve boxes.

Storage: American Postcards

The second problem is that they are not posted…as I had requested from 2001 to 2012. But I had under-estimated the power of a stamp and some friendly text to make a postcard more real. The reality is that a postcard that has not gone thru the mail is nothing more than a photograph.

Albums: World Postcards

Of course it is not just United States of America. I have seven albums that contain unposted postcards from around the world…just over 1,000 postcards. When family, friends and neighbours go abroad, they tend to bring me home some postcards. Just yesterday as I added three cards from Thailand and Malaysia (brought home last year by friends on honeymoon).

My preference is now clearly for POSTED postcards.

There are essentially two types of postcard that has gone thru the mail.

Albums: Posted Postcards

The albums above hold postcards that were sent to my current address, previous addresses and family addresses. The green album contains postcards that are especially emotional for me. The oldest is a postcard sent by my late father to my grandmother in 1946. And the early albums contain postcards sent by and to members of my extended family. The later albums are postcards from friends, including some that started as “internet friends” and are now very close to me. Other cards are “one-off” swaps on Facebook or randomly received thru PostCrossing. I will write about PostCrossing separately.

Albums: World Stamps

I do buy (posted) postcards at Collector Fairs and I put these in my “worldwide” stamp collection. Sometimes it is possible to pick up an unlikely country…Ethiopia, Gambia, Ecuador.

Albums: World Postcards

Postcards from holiday/vacation destinations…United States of America, Spain, Cyprus, France, Italy, Greece are of course easy to obtain. I have maybe 40 postcards from Spain, which are integrated with my stamps from Spain.

The Not-So-Golden Age of Irish Postcards

Yesterday, I wrote about a “Golden Age of Irish Postcards” which in my terms was 1900 thru 1922. But I am much more familiar with the period after 1970 which was an era that took the glitter off postcards.

Back in the 1960s when I was a child, foreign travel was rare but maybe three of four times in the summmer season, our family would get a postcard from an aunt or uncle or neighbour who was spending a week in an Irish seaside town like Bray (County Wicklow), Bundoran (County Donegal) or Salthill (County Galway).

Indeed sitting on a bench looking out to sea on a rainy and windy day and writing a bundle of postcards to family, neighbours or workplace was very much part of the Irish summer experience.

Of course back in the 1960s and 1970s, when a postcard from Bray, Bundoran or Salthill dropped thru our letterbox, I could not wait to soak off the stamp for my collection. To me, postcards were just a means of delivering stamps.

I only really appreciated postcards from the late 1980s. I was starting to think of myself as an adult stamp collector and one aspect of this was “writing up” my Irish collection. I had seen displays where folks added postcards to enhance a collection.

My wife and baby sons and I were in the city of Waterford and I saw this postcard.

Waterford

The statue at the left is of Fr Luke Wadding, who had been the subject of two stamps issued in 1957. Perfect to enhance my album page. Oddly, I did not add this postcard to my stamp collection. Surprisingly it became the first postcard in my Irish postcard collection.

Why?

Well on one level “writing up” a stamp collection is a good thing but there is always the danger of over-writing, cluttering an album page and distracting from, rather than enhancing the stamps.

And on another level, buying postcards was the cheapest form of souvenir as we travelled around Ireland on day trips and vacations in the 1990s. It was much more reliable than taking photographs (and forgetting to have the film developed).

And importantly postcards were readily available and not just in the bigger cities and the coastal towns. Buying postcards became part of our trips, sometimes travelling long distances.

On only a few occasions, I was disappointed. Mostly in midland counties like Longford or Laois. But sometimes small villages had a sense of local pride and had postcards available.

Ballyconnell, County Cavan

So I am an accidental collector of Irish postcards.

My Irish Postcard Albums

Yet in that intense period 1990 thru (say) 2012, I built up a collection which is now about 1,950 postcards in 35 albums. There is an album for each Irish county plus three albums that are generic, or political or humour. None of these 1,950 postcards have been posted. They are all unwritten.

County Mayo album

It is an uneven collection. Some counties, Dublin, Cork, Antrim, Donegal have a lot of postcards. Others such as Carlow, Laois, Longford have comparitively few.

But I am glad that I collected them. Since I started to travel more, specifically after 2017 and the free travel pass all over the island, there are not so many outlets that sell postcards.

Frankly our cell phones capture more and better images and we can upload them to Facebook or a blog quickly and reach more of our friends than we could if we actually sent postcards thru the mail.

Really what it means is that Postcards and social interaction is not the same as it was in the Golden Age (1900-1922). Nor is sending postcards related to Tourism as it was in the 1960s and 1970s.

Really now, the good outlets are gift shops in galleries, museums and the like. What we have now is collectors buying cards to send t other collectors.

The Golden Age of Irish Postcards

“The Golden Age of Irish Postcards” is a term I use for postcards stamped and posted from (say) 1900 thru 1922.

In these two decades, Ireland was part of the “United Kingdom”, used British stamps and the postmarks were solely in the English language.

The ambiance of the island, especially in middle class, military or administration was also British.

But in my own view, the island was at least united. albeit under British rule. But I think that this period in Ireland is like a prologue to 1922 and later……in political, postal and social history.

There is something curiously “back to the future” about these postcards.

In 1920 we had postcards. In 2020 we have the Internet,, Facebook and cell phones.

A century ago, young people used postcards to keep in touch with their friends. They flirted on postcards. They did not use emojis and smiley faces and sign off with “LOL” but in so many ways they were socially active.

The image on a postcard is not always “topographical” (views). Often they are images and text that are not very different from Internet “memes”. often they are politically motivated.

In the 22nd century, historians will be interested in our Internet, Facebook and “texting” culture. And I think this is why I am fascinated by postcards from the first decades of the 20th century.

Vintage postcards is something that I have only become interested in over the last decade. They are readily available at most Stamp Fairs. Prices vary in accordance with condition but also in terms of “theme” (humour, military, royalty, religion etc) and of course some views are also sought by avid postcard collectors. Some people collect some specific publishers.

Postcards (1900-1922)

Of course from an Irish perspective, the images of Ireland and the Irish produced by English publishers can be shockingly stereotypical, patronising or just plain racist.

Postcards (1900-1922)

I declare that my interest in postcards is not intense. My original intention was to have at least one “English” postmark from all of the 32 counties in Ireland. At today’s date I have around 200 postmarks and at least one from every county.

Postcards 1900-1922

“English” postmarks

I have usually paid around 50 pence or £1 for a postcard. I don’t think I have ever paid more than £5 for a postcard. As most Fairs I attend are in the north, most of the stock held by dealers is northern.

There is one sad aspect. At many Fairs or markets, there will be a bundle of postcards that maybe came from “house clearance”. So sad sometimes to see some postcards written in (say) 1915 that meant enough to someone and maybe to a family for two or three generations end up on a market stall.

Sometimes, it seems wrong and voyeuristic. Sometimes it feels like preserving history. But AT ALL TIMES these images and messages from the past should be treated with absolute respect.

SOAR: The Wants List

As far as I can work out from An Post’s Store Locator app, there are 942 post offices in the Republic of Ireland. I have SOAR stamps from 887.

This means I still need SOAR stamps from 55 post offices. This is my Wants List.

SOAR Wants List

Kiloware is no longer a cost effective method of picking up SOAR stamps. Many are from very small areas. In fact four of the post offices are on offshore islands with very small populations. There are of course ferries.

While a train journey to Dublin is easy to pick up the post offices there, some road trips (sometimes quite long) are straight-forward for picking up the SOARs in the northern half of the island.

But road trips are necessarily not a winter time activity. And there is the COVID restrictions on travel.

As for the southern half of the country…well maybe some weekend breaks over the next few years.

But just how many of these 55 post offices will be on the next closure “Hit List” by An Post is a big question.

Political Campaign Buttons

Today is Election Day in United States of America.

As I have written in previous posts, I have a collecting “gene”. All forms of collecting intrigue me. Collecting election campaign buttons seems to be a hobby unique to USA.

Campaign Buttons

Above is campaign buttons sent to me by some friends.

Buddy Can You Spare A…

Dime? Nickel? Cent? Quarter?

Coins of United States of America.

It seems that I have been familiar with American coins since I first saw a television set in 1957.

In 2001, an American friend sent me this album and booklet. It contained the first ten ” State Quarter” coins that were scheduled to be issued from 1999 to 2008

The 50 State Quarters Album

But I have only ever been in USA once …for two weeks in February 2013. I had American bank notes (which I found confusing) and used them for the first time at McDonalds at Atlanta airport before travelling on via Austin to San Marcos in Texas.

Maybe what surprised me most about American coins is that there are only four coins (cent, five cents/nickel, ten cents/dime and 25 cents/quarter) in general circulation. This seemed odd to me as Sterling and Euro have eight coins circulating.

Having American coins in my pocket was interesting. There is something iconic about the Quarter and certainly I was putting aside the “State Quarters” to bring home with me and maybe had the intention of filling the album sent to me in 2001.

Maybe around 2015, I started buying American coins at Stamp and Coin Fairs. I now have 47 states in my Quarter collection and only Minnesota, Wisconsin and Montana are missing.

American coins are simple to collect and yet paradoxically complex. Simple in the sense of four basic coins that are plentiful and complex in the sense that nearly all coins have a letter “D”, “P” or “S” to indicate if the coin was minted in Denver, Philadelphia or San Francisco. Complex also in the sense that in recent years there are recently introduced themes …states, territories, national parks life of Abraham Lincoln and so on. This makes life difficult for me as a casual collector.

I would not want to get TOO involved in American coins.

SOAR Points (Part Four)

In 2017, a new theme for SOAR commenced. The History of Ireland in 100 Objects” largely based on a book by Fintan O’Toole, a journalist.

Many people believe O’Toole to be an intellectual.

The theme is a “worthy” theme but will take years to complete. Some of the pre-historic artefacts seem too remote. Below is the 2017 SOAR.

SOAR 2017

The year 2017 was a personal milestone for me. I became entitled to a Senior Smart Pass on my 65th birthday, entitling me to free travel on public transport (bus, train, tram) anywhere on the island of Ireland. This gave me the opportunity to visit the post offices on my revised list, compiled from An Post’s website.

I also discovered a good source for kiloware. Much of the kiloware in Ireland are either coil or booklet stamps and from 2017, these are based on the “100 Objects” theme. And a lot of the kiloware is SOAR.

I am sure many collectors would think most SOAR are not collectable. In design terms, only one each of the SOAR stamps…ie ten stamps are unique.

But for me…in the context of different denominations and those unique 4digit grof numbers, every SOAR is desirable.

I am grateful to “Murglebop” (aka David) a contributor to StampBoards, who has supplied a link to the list of 1,129 Irish post offices open at October 2017.

SOAR 2018

The 2018 SOAR was the second phase of eight stamps on the “100 Objects” theme. But a major surprise came in August 2018 when an additional eight SOAR were issued. These were “popular” designs which had previously been issued as regular commemorative stamps. Oddly these were sold as a set of twelve by the Philatelic Bureau, two of the eight designs were used twice and just two of the “100 Objects” designs were retained.

Is the “100 Objects” theme a critical and popular disappointment.

In October 2018, it was announced that An Post planned to close up to 159 post offices in the network.

A few of the post offices on the “hit list” were reprieved but the vast majority closed. There were local campaigns in villages and often led by local politicians. I do not fully subscribe to the notion that every major decision made in Dublin is part of “the war on rural Ireland” but ignoring the catchy rhetoric, there is surely a need for post offices to be at the very heart of often remote communities.

SOAR 2019

In 2019, the third phase of the “100 Objects” was issued. And there was an additional two former commemoratives that were added.

SOAR 2019 (2nd Roll)

Integrating the 2019 SOAR and “new” commemoratives into the rolls in post offices shows sixteen designs in a roll, eight “100 Objects” and eight commemoratives. The four strips above were bought at the General Post Office in Dublin in May 2019.

SOAR 2020

Of course one word dominates 2020…CoronaVirus. Eight new SOAR on the “100 Objects” theme and four ex-commemoratives were issued in July. In most cases, these have not reached post offices which are still using “old” stock.

SOAR Points (Part Three)

The year 2016 was a big year in Irish Philately. It was the Centenary of the Easter Rising.

Fittingly there were sixteen stamps issued in the Stamps on A Roll format. The set had both popular and critical acclaim because it was both a Celebration and a Commemoration. And more than “inclusive”.

The SOARs (Easter Rising and Christmas) are shown below.

SOAR 2016

I think by 2016, I had started to enjoy visiting post offices. To buy SOAR stamps, it was not necessary to pay the full amount of national rate mail (70 cents in 2016). I realised that if I took a (say) 60 cents stamp from a previous year into a any post office, I could ask the postal clerk for a 10 cents stamp to “top up” to the national rate.

Indeed when national rate increased from 70 cents to 72 cents during 2016, I used the 70 cents Easter stamps to obtain 2 cents stamps in multiple post offices.

You may notice that while I generally buy new issues at the Philatelic Counter in GPO Dublin (0250) the Christmas SOARs shown above were actually purchased in Lifford, County Donegal (2450).

It also became apparent that many of the post offices in the “IPC” list from 2010 had been closed.

At the end of 2016, I used the post “Store Locator” at An Post’s website to compile a new workable list of post offices. Also worth noting that it was not always about post offices closing. On occasions new post offices opened and while An Post’s website did not include the grof numbers, I had at least addresses to go and check out these post offices.