On pounds, shillings and pence, as a cashless society looms... For Sunday Miscellany on RTÉ Radio 1, listen to The Filthy Lucre by Miriam Uhlemann above.
The end of cash is coming down the tracks; those coins and notes that have sloshed around pockets and purses for two and a half thousand years have their days numbered, it seems.
The cash I first met as a child, taking me up to my teenage years and decimalisation, was that of the new Irish State, first minted and printed in 1928.
An innocence and wholesomeness pinged off it, each coin boasting a native Irish animal. Horse, leaping salmon, stomping bull, greyhound, hare, a hen and her chickens, a pig and her piglets and on the worthless farthing, a woodcock...
Listen to more from Sunday Miscellany here.
