20 Pounds

Ireland's wartime currency situation was complicated by the country's neutrality and its continuing peg to sterling — the Irish pound remained at exact parity with the British pound throughout the Emergency, as the war years were officially called. That parity made high-denomination notes like this one largely instruments of banking and commercial settlement rather than everyday exchange; the average Irish wage in 1943 made a twenty-pound note an extraordinary sum.

Waterlow & Sons printed the series from London throughout the war years despite the obvious logistical friction of supplying a neutral state from a city under periodic air attack. The P#5D designation places this within the long-running Ploughman series, which the Central Bank had inherited from its predecessor and continued issuing with minimal modification well into the 1940s.