Dr. Linda King

I was thinking about this on the way in.

Even if you think of the Olympics from 2012, it was all about inventions and it was about the steam engine and it was about the Industrial Revolution and it was all man-made things.

And now they're going back to, you know, the natural world.

Yeah, I mean, famously, I mean, this is a very famous story within design circles, but our coinage committee was set up in 1926 under W.B.

Yeats and the coins were produced a mere two years later, which is quite fast by our standards.

And there was no need for us to have new coinage, but it was about symbolising regime change in effect.

And I suppose a lot of Irish people may have had a problem with exchanging coins with George V on them.

So Yates went back to the Greek idea of putting animals on coins.

He said he didn't want the hackneyed symbols of the Celtic revival.

He didn't want Kathleen de Houlihan.

He didn't want sunbursts and round towers and all of that kind of thing.

So it was his idea to go back to wildlife.

So he put together...

a committee and they went out to international competition and there was people from sculptors from Britain from Slovakia from America Paul Manship who did the big Prometheus statue outside the Rockefeller Center he was unsuccessful and it was a British sculptor called Albert Power who won the competition and he produced the coins that are very fondly remembered of

the horse, the woodcock, the hen with the chicks.

I have a few props here.

There's a little pig.

There is a hare.

And I actually, I only found out recently that the hare is one of the few indigenous animals to Ireland.

That a lot of what we think is indigenous, like squirrels, aren't actually.