Civil servants are proud of the smooth changeover from punts to euros, buthas the consumer won or lost, asks Kathy Sheridan.
For a few days, Sir John Lavery's painting of Lady Hazel has been gracing the lobby of the Central Bank. Up till then it had always hung in the bank's boardroom, a position that doubtless she would have cherished in life, given her vice-regal aspirations.
Lady Lavery managed to become the emblem of old Erin, courtesy of a recycled drawingroom portrait and the 1927 Currency Commission. This despite the fact that she had the distinct disadvantage of not having an Irish root to her name and an inordinate appetite for prominent Irishmen (including Michael Collins and Kevin O'Higgins). She was given a final, fond farewell last night at the Central Bank over a few drinks, before being handed over to the National Gallery today.
And that, says the Central Bank's press officer, is the height of it.
Ah surely something more glitteringly celebratory is in order, given that today marks the final hurdle of a largely triumphant changeover? "It will be more like a collective sigh of relief," says Neil Whoriskey.
Philip Hammell, chairman of the Euro Changeover Board, the man who knocked heads together and kept his while others were losing theirs, is similarly philosophical about the significance of the date. "What I want to do is go for a long walk," he says.
A friend with some sense of occasion had just dropped in a bottle of champagne. But it says something about the man that possibly his fondest moment was a congratulatory call on January 5th from the Brother who had been the Head at CBS Marino when Hammell was a student there 40 years ago.
After some prodding, he concedes that tonight, he "might just walk into a little place for a libation around midnight". There may even be a long holiday.
Finally, he concedes that he may even be a little proud. "There is a tremendous tribute to those who made it work. I think the Irish people are slightly proud of how they've dealt with this - and they're entitled to be."
The fact is that we outstripped everyone and scooped the prize with the Netherlands for the speed with which we sloughed off the "legacy currencies", as they are called, and adapted to the new. By last Thursday evening, 79 per cent of Irish currency had been returned to the Central Bank; the average for the euro area is still 65 per cent.
In practice, this means that hundreds of millions of notes are being shredded into tiny strips, packed into briquette-shaped parcels (making your average £50 note briquette worth about £50,000) and dumped in landfills.
Coin disposal is another matter. Once returned to the bank, they have a brief stop-off in its Sandyford warehouse, in a football-pitch sized building which was specially constructed with reinforced floors to hold the billion euro coins in advance of distribution. From there, they go in regular shipments to a company in Spain for melting down and recycling into blank metal discs, ready to be turned into new coinage.
For Philip Hammell, his proudest moment was that first day of January when he arrived into the office at 8.05 a.m. and one of the staff went out to put a euro coin into a parking meter.
"And it worked, just like the corporation had said it would . . . Then I went down to do an interview with the BBC in the Central Bank plaza and was looking at the ATMs as I was walking. At one of them, I found a receipt slip which showed that someone had taken out 20 euro at 6.36 a.m."
Here was the original "faceless civil servant", as he describes himself, who four years ago suddenly "bursts out into sudden blaze" (Milton) to become the Irish face of a mammoth task, to help create a common currency for 300 million people in places as far-flung as Helsinki, Athens and Ahakista.
He can now admit that he was "absolutely terrified" to find himself being introduced by name at that first "genuinely nerve-racking" press conference.
"It's been wonderful for us, wonderful for us as civil servants to be given a chance to show what we can do. The success or failure of the changeover was always going to be very public, very demonstrable. You couldn't be human if you didn't get a warming inner glow about the way it has gone."
Coming up to January 1st, the civil servants did their best to hide fears of disaster. Something as simple as the toll machines failing to work and evening news footage of five miles of tailbacks on the M50 would have caused coolness towards the infant currency.
Instead, the main problem for Neil Whoriskey and colleagues on an icy January 1st was to keep enough whiskey in stock - via repeated trips to Dunnes Stores - to make hot toddies for the happy if hypothermia-threatened queuers outside the bank. Along with gallons of tea and coffee, they got through 25 litres of whiskey and 10 large bottles of champagne.
Around the continent, came stories of bottlenecks, technical snags, flaring tempers at checkouts, strikes and bank robberies, not to mention doomsday warnings from Italian government ministers.
There were, of course, the tooth-grinding cases here of those who interpreted the "New Currency - Same Price" logo in a "creative" way, or even made an honest mistake in the confusion of the sales and dual system.
The hapless AIB, which failed to come up with the euro chequebooks on time. The publicans who always seemed to round their prices up, never down. Limerick University car-park whose "rounding-up" took its one punt charge up to two euros. The motor taxation department of Galway County Council which, despite a sweet note urging its customers to "rest assured that in no case will anybody be required to pay more as a result of the changeover", promptly rounded one person's bill from £434.25 up to €435. The travel agency whose service charge went from 10 punts to 14 euros. The big stores such as Marks & Spencer, which had to remove lines of clothing after admitting that they had done something more than round up in a few cases.
These examples - mostly supplied by the Consumers Assoocation - may seem like small stuff, says the association's Dermott Jewell, but they add up if someone is selling in volume.
The only remaining resistance seems to be against spending euro coins. Another straw poll suggests that this is a widespread phenomenon; we prefer to flash a note rather than fumble around with coins, looking slow and myopic.
Get over it. Retailers really need the change, says Neil Whoriskey.
