Irish pound
former currency of Ireland
The pound (Irish: punt) was the currency of Ireland until 2002. Its ISO 4217 code was IEP, and the symbol was £ (or IR£ for distinction). The Irish pound was replaced by the euro on 1 January 1999. Euro currency did not start circulating until the beginning of 2002.
First pound
The earliest Irish coinage was introduced in the late 10th century, with an £sd system of one pound divided into twenty shillings, each of twelve silver pence. Parity with sterling was established by King John around 1210, so that Irish silver could move freely into the English economy and help to finance his wars in France. However, in 1460, King Henry VI summoned a parliament at Drogheda which passed legislation to devalue Irish coins. This caused them to be minted with a different silver content than those of England, so that the values of the two currencies diverged.
During the Williamite War of 1689–1691, King James II, no longer reigning in England and Scotland, issued an emergency base-metal coinage known as gun money.
In 1701, a proclamation stated one English shilling was equal to 1s.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Irish pound” is former currency of Ireland. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Irish, pound and former, not as a finished interpretation.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 30, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q270642. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2002, 1999, 1210 and 1460.
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This entry incorporates text from “Irish pound” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.