Reul / 6 Pingine

Ireland's small coinage of this period was designed by Percy Metcalfe in 1928 and remained essentially unchanged for decades — one of the longest uninterrupted runs of any 20th-century democratic coinage. The copper-nickel composition introduced for this type replaced the original nickel alloy, a wartime and postwar metals adjustment that affected much of the Irish series. Metcalfe won the design commission through a competition judged by a government-appointed committee that included W.B. Yeats, who took the selection unusually seriously and wrote extensively on the aesthetics of national coinage.