Ron Smith - Collecting Irish Stamps

After their meal at Mansfield House Hotel, President Ron Smith gave a talk on his collecting of Irish stamps. He recounted how this interest had begun when he met his Irish wife-to-be and continued through a stamp shop in Glasgow being on his route to university. Many years later he has a very extensive collection but Ron explained that this brought with it some hard decisions. The main issue was rising costs. Postage rates have obviously increased so that individual stamp issues are so much more expensive, and there seem to be many more such issues nowadays across the year, some with little connection to Ireland, such as an issue scheduled for later this year to celebrate Sydney Opera House. He spoke also of the wide variety of formats in which stamps are issued, some specifically aimed at collectors, with commemorative sheets, sheetlets, booklets, issues shared with other countries, and nowadays coil stamps, and machine printed labels. All of these a very far cry from the earliest days of Irish stamps with perhaps one commemorative issue per year and definitive, or everyday stamps which remained in use for forty years! However, having come this far, he was now reluctant to stop collecting!