A stamp is an inherently humble physical artefact — paper, ink, adhesive — yet it is also fundamentally part of the bricks-and-mortar of state-building. In the case of commemorative stamps, they express not only political and cultural meanings, but our understandings of the events they represent. Equally, stamps are touched, they move, they circulate, they are collected and saved, they are discarded. Perhaps few symbols of the State hold such universal appeal and are so widely used: stamps are simultaneously temporal, cherished, ubiquitous, and invisible.
The Irish Post Office’s very first commemorative stamp issue celebrated the centenary of Catholic Emancipation in 1929, and featured a set of three stamps, designed by Leo Whelan, bearing a single portrait of Daniel O’Connell. Nearly a century later, An Post’s engagement with the Decade of Centenaries has centred on a wide range of events, people, symbols and images.
A new book published this month to mark An Post’s contributions to the Decade of Centenaries celebrates (and includes originals of) each of the 54 different stamps in 26 issues from 2013-2022. These began with the 1913 General Lockout (issued August 22nd, 2013) and extend to the centenary of the death of Erskine Childers (issued November 17th, 2022). Themed across six sections – War, Revolution, Struggle, Sacrifice, Agreement, and State – the book reviews these stamps’ histories, their processes of creation, and the work of advisory committee members, artists, designers, and An Post staff who have contributed to their realisation.
The Philatelic Advisory Committee (PAC) is the body which reviews, advises, and proposes its annual stamp programme, which is subject to the approval of the Government. Chaired by the historian Felix M Larkin, the PAC’s commemorative programme has been guided by the Government’s Expert Advisory Group on the Decade of Centenaries. More broadly, each year the PAC considers 200–300 proposals for stamp ideas submitted by the general public, in addition to recommendations from the PAC itself and from Government departments.
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Following discussion and debate, recommendations for the philatelic programme from the PAC are transmitted to the Stamp Design Advisory Committee (SDAC), currently chaired by the artist Mick O’Dea PPRHA, which considers potential visual and design solutions. Commissions for each stamp are awarded to a wide range of design and illustration professionals. Final designs and the full stamp programme are recommended by An Post to the Department of the Environment, Climate and Communications (DECC), who formally submit each stamp to Government for approval.
For some commemorative issues, the SDAC quickly identified a ‘defining’ visual signifier or image for the centenary — Seán Keating’s Men of the South painting (1921–22) depicting the War of Independence is one example, which was reproduced on a stamp issue on February 20th, 2020. In others, designers have been tasked with devising creative and inventive solutions. One example is WorkGroup’s design of a stamp issued for the centenary of the first public meeting of Dáil Éireann (January 17th, 2019). It offers a graphical representation based on the electronic voting system used today in the Dáil Éireann chamber, featuring a colour-coded breakdown of those elected members at the January 1919 meeting recorded as imprisoned, deported, present, and absent.
The stamp marking the centenary of the death of the Meath poet Francis Ledwidge, issued on July 27th, 2017, is another expression of tragic loss and sacrifice. Ledwidge’s Song of the Fields (1915) established his posthumous reputation as the Poet of the Blackbird, with verses steeped in pastoral themes. His commemorative stamp frames a portrait of him aged 25 in 1913, mere months before his enlistment in the British Army and four years before his death in action in France on July 31st, 1917, with the image of a blackbird taking wing.
Our complex and erratic journey towards national sovereignty is mirrored within Irish postal history itself. The GPO is one of the most iconic symbols of Irish nationalism and revolution and as the headquarters of Republican rebels during the Easter Rising, it prominently featured on the earliest Easter Rising commemorative stamps issued by the Irish Post Office for the 25th anniversary, on April 12th, 1941. Perhaps ironically, the destruction of the GPO by British forces in 1916 did not entail the loss of the archives of the Irish Postal Service: this occurred on May 25th, 1921 with the burning of the Custom House, the headquarters of the Irish Civil Service, by the Irish Republican Army during the War of Independence. In the wake of the new Irish Constitution in September 1922, the first definitive stamp of the Irish Free State was issued on December 6th,1922, but its plates were struck in London, and there is dispute over whether its first printing occurred in Britain or Ireland. Co-dependency on the British Post Office continued throughout the turbulent period of the Civil War.
Suitable iconography for the new Free State was subjected to intense debate in its early years. During the Seanad debates on the Coinage Bill of 1926, WB Yeats memorably opined that the official designs of the Government’s new coins and postage stamps should serve as ‘silent ambassadors of national taste’, but he also cynically added that two days earlier he’d received a letter from an ‘exceedingly famous decorative artist, in which he described the postage stamps of this country as at once the humblest and ugliest in the world.’
We have reached a point in Irish philatelic history where Yeats’ admonishments have been thoroughly countered, and Ireland’s stamps are now unique and distinct visual, material and artistic forms. They draw from the documents and artefacts of the historical past, but are also another chapter in the remembrance of that past. Moreover, their material form, circulation and collection renders them a particularly tangible and mobile form of history and meaning-making. Yeats’ assertion that stamps are ‘silent ambassadors’ is perhaps less persuasive, since they are undoubtedly potent expressions of national identity. But if Irish philately is also a record of the voice of the State, today this is a polyphonic one.
Dr Emily Mark-FitzGerald is Associate Professor, School of Art History & Cultural Policy, University College Dublin
