Dr. Linda King

Now, Maud Gonne, she famously didn't like them, but neither did the Catholic Church.

But there was one comment, and I don't know who this is from, but they said, if these pagan symbols once get a hold, then it is the thin edge of the wedge of Freemasonry sunk into the very life of our Catholic... Catholicity?

I don't know how to pronounce that properly.

For the sole object of having these pagan symbols instead of religious emblems on our coins is to wipe out all traces of religion from our mind, to forget the land of saints and beget a land of devil worshippers where evil may reign supreme.

It was.

And it's, you know, it's very, I mean, a lot of countries do this once they gain independence.

It's how to straddle that, what we've come from and what we are and what we want to be going forward.

So we've got these symbols of what the American anthropologist would call essentialism, Clifford Girtz.

And then trying to project this modern idea of Ireland going forward.

So the designs are very modernist, they're very reductionist, but they are speaking to what we were at the time.

1971, yeah.

And we had a few changes then when...

An Irish sculptor, Gabriel Hayes, who's actually female, even though her name implies otherwise, she produced three coins, the halfpenny, the penny and the twopence.

But again, took birds, you know, natural creatures and did a Celtic version of those.

We had Kathleen O'Houlihan, yeah, painted by Lavery, his wife, Hazel Lavery.

And they were very famously friendly with Michael Collins and various people involved in the treaty negotiations in 1921.

So she's represented as Kathleen O'Houlihan, balanced on Brian Brew's harp with the Lakes of Killarney in the background.

So we've got a whole rake of 19th century imagery going on there.

Yeah, so we only had three series of notes.

So the first one was Lady Lavery and she lasted up until, I think that was... 1976.