1 Penny - George III

Ireland had no copper coinage of its own between 1782 and 1805, leaving the country flooded with lightweight counterfeits and privately issued tokens that circulated by necessity rather than law. The 1805 issue — struck at Soho Mint in Birmingham under Matthew Boulton's steam-powered presses — was a deliberate attempt to displace that unofficial currency with a heavy, mechanically precise coinage difficult to fake. Boulton applied the same technology he had used for the British regal copper recoinage of 1797.

It was among the last copper issues for Ireland before the monetary union with Britain rendered a separate Irish copper series redundant.