In Dublin, the artist Frank Buckley has constructed the interior walls of his flat with bricks made of shredded, de-commissioned Euro bank notes—with a face value of 1.4 billion Euros—that the Irish mint gave him for this purpose. All the furniture in the flat, including the microwave and the lavatory, is also lined with the shredded notes. He calls the lavatory “the Bertie bowl,” after Bertie Ahern, the now- discredited prime minister who presided over and benefited politically from the Irish property bubble that has indebted the country for decades to come….

Ireland having since been placed more or less under the tutelage of the European Central Bank, the European Union, and the International Monetary Fund, Buckley has erected a tomb to Irish sovereignty in one of his flat’s three rooms. Initially intended as a private home—Buckley has praised shredded Euro bank notes for their heat-insulating quality—his flat, literally made of money, soon had so many visitors that he decided to open it as a museum.