100th Anniversary of the First Sitting of Dáil Éireann

A depiction of the first session of Dáil Éireann in the Round Room of the Mansion House — the official residence of the Lord Mayor of Dublin. The upper "bar" represents the gallery filled with onlookers, arching over the main chamber below, with the many heads of those present shown as dots. At the centre, the inscription "An Chéad Dáil" (the first Dáil) in Irish script, with the year "1919" above. The country name "EIRE" and the issue year "2019" round off the design at the bottom.

On 21 January 1919, the Dáil Éireann - the Irish parliament - convened for the first time at the Mansion House in Dublin, drawing its mandate from the December 1918 general election, in which Sinn Féin had won an overwhelming majority. The elected representatives, who saw themselves as delegates of an independent Irish republic, gathered in the Round Room of the Dublin Lord Mayor's residence and adopted a declaration of independence along with a democratic programme. In doing so, they laid the institutional foundation for the Irish independent state - alongside a guerrilla war that would unfold against British rule in the years that followed. The Dáil Éireann, whose name derives from the Old Irish for "Assembly of Ireland," deliberately constituted itself as the legitimate representation of the people and claimed state sovereignty at a time when Ireland was still part of the United Kingdom.

The founding assembly of 1919 is regarded in Irish historiography as a pivotal date in the process of national self-determination. It marks the transition from parliamentary agitation to institutional statehood and stands at the beginning of a sequence of events - the War of Independence, the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, the founding of the Free State in 1922 - that permanently transformed the island's political landscape. Today's parliament of the Republic of Ireland traces its democratic continuity directly back to this first sitting. Ireland marked the 100th anniversary of the founding assembly in 2019 with a series of official commemorative events, which included the issue of this 2-euro commemorative coin.