1 Pound Bank of Ireland

The Bank of Ireland's first post-partition pound note series arrived in a politically charged atmosphere: the Irish Free State had established the Currency Commission in 1927 as the overarching regulatory body, but the legacy commercial banks — Bank of Ireland among them — retained the right to issue their own notes, a concession that persisted well into the mid-twentieth century. This note circulated alongside identically denominated notes from five other authorized banks, all legally interchangeable and all tied one-to-one with sterling.

Printed by Waterlow & Sons in London, the series ran across a date span that coincides almost exactly with the worst years of the Free State's economic retrenchment. High emigration, agricultural depression, and the Economic War with Britain from 1932 onward compressed domestic commerce sharply — not conditions that produced high-volume note wear.