Ireland

Ireland ran for centuries on units of account rather than on coin of its own. The early law tracts reckoned value in cumals, séts and milch cows — a cumal was three milch cows, and a milch cow answered to an ounce of silver — and those tracts attached explicit honour-prices to poets, judges, wrights and smiths, which makes the Old Irish legal material one of the few bodies of evidence anywhere that sets a public tariff on skilled and creative work. From the later middle ages the island used English coin, and Dublin kept a separate money of account, the Irish pound, standing at thirteen Irish pounds to twelve sterling; the English guinea passed in Dublin at twenty-two shillings and ninepence Irish, so any gold conversion has to say which pound is meant. Eighteenth-century Dublin is unusually well served for records of design expenditure: the Guild of Merchants minutes, the Wide Streets Commissioners’ books, cathedral chapter acts and a dense newspaper press all survive, and the Irish Architectural Archive has indexed the resulting payments building by building.

Making a film here? The Canada–Ireland corridor covers the treaty, the incentives, and where to start.