Scannalach!

Distributed in September, this flyer from the Royal Mail seemed to have passed like a letter at the post office, without any Irish commenting.

On the back, it announced for 29 September 2008 the stamp issue for the fifty years of Regional Postage Stamps in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

It bears a reproduction of an old map of the British Islands (thank you, public domain)... a time when Ireland was govern under the British rule. No more the case in 195 when Ulster issued these local definitive stamps, designed after the Wilding series.

And that fact comprised every insitutional bias British people invented (or how to lose an Empire without losing your face): independence accepted in 1922, change of the United Kingdom's name in 1927, the Republic of Ireland out of the Commonwealth in 1949,...