Novel Coinage
Beasts and Birds on Money of Ireland A HAPPY IDEA LONDON, December 3. The design of the new Irish Free State coinage differs from the stereotyped heraldic emblems which characterise the money of most other nations. The advisory committee decided that all the inscriptions on the coins should be in Irish, and that no effigies of modern persons should be employed. Dr. Thomas Bodkin, director of the National Gallery of Ireland, realising that Ireland’s wealth is derived from cattle, fish and agriculture, conceived ■the happy idea of symbolising the fact in the coinage. Therefore the halfcrown, the largest coin of the series, bears a lifelike representation of an Irish hunter. The florin shows a leaping salmon, the shilling a sturdy Irish bull; the sixpence a wolfhound at gaze; the threepenny bit a hare couchant; the penny—admittedly to please the women and children, who mostly handle this coin—hen and chickens, the halfpenny a sow with a litter, and the farthing a woodchuck in flight.
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/SUNAK19281215.2.82
Bibliographic details
Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 538, 15 December 1928, Page 9
Word Count
165Novel Coinage Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 538, 15 December 1928, Page 9
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