Series A banknotes

The original oil on canvas painting of Lady Lavery, titled Portrait of Lady Lavery as Kathleen Ni Houlihan (1927), is displayed at the National Gallery of Ireland on loan from the Central Bank of Ireland.

Reworking a portrait of his wife Hazel of 1909, he cast her as Kathleen ni Houlihan, the mythical heroine of W.B.

Cosgrave, President of the Executive Council of the Irish Free State, as saying of the banknotes: ‘Every Irishman, not to mention the foreigner who visits Ireland, will carry one next to his heart’.

[2] The watermark on all Series A banknotes is the "Head of Erin"[1] taken from the statue, Hibernia with the Bust of Lord Cloncurry (1844), sculpted in Rome by John Hogan and brought to Ireland in 1846.

[6] The statue depicts Ireland, represented by the allegorical female figure of Hibernia, also known as “Erin”, with her arm around a bust of Lord Cloncurry.

Hogan modeled the female figure after his Italian wife, Cornelia Bevignani.

Banknotes produced during the Second World War were overprinted with different letters so that particular batches could be identified and removed from circulation if they were lost in transit between the printers in Britain and Dublin.