Stamp design and soft power: “the silent ambassadors of national taste”

This paper takes the designs for Ireland’s second definitive series of stamps as the focus for on an examination of graphic design as ideological conduit ––a manifestation of ‘soft power’. It considers the ways in which the Republic of Ireland ––an apparently peripheral nation-state–– sought, by visually invoking the past, to reimagine and invert power relations with the former colonial power, Britain.

In 1966, the recently established Stamp Design Advisory Committee invited three Irish and twelve international designers to enter a competition to replace the definitive series that had been in circulation since the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922. The theme was ‘Early Irish Art’ and the controversial winner was a West German artist, Heinrich Gerl, two of whose four designs were based on examples of 8th Century English decorative art.

Drawing on several unpublished archival sources, the paper investigates the various discourses around the competition and its aftermath in the context of efforts by an influential minority in the Irish state agencies to construct an export identity for Irish goods and to overcome an association between modernisation and Anglicisation that persisted in post-war Ireland. It argues that the SDAC’s choice of winning stamps could be understood as an act of decolonisation and as a celebration of Ireland’s intellectual heritage in Europe in the context of application for EEC membership.