As you know, your Prime Minister, Mr Sanader, and our Taoiseach, Mr Ahern, announced last year that our two central banks would cooperate in issuing collector coins to commemorate the work of Croatian sculptor, Ivan Mestrovic. Mr Mestrovic submitted a design for the first coinage of the Irish Free State in 1927.
Unfortunately, because of difficulty contacting him – he was in the United States - his design arrived too late for consideration. The Chairman of the Design Committee, Irish poet William Butler Yeats, subsequently wrote “He made one magnificent design and, on discovering that the date had passed, gave it to the Irish Free State with great generosity”.