UEFA Euro 2012 in October 2011, the nine group winners qualified automatically, along with the highest ranked second placed team. The remaining eight-second placed teams contested two-legged play-offs, and the four winners qualified for the finals. Twelve of the sixteen finalists participated at the previous tournament in 2008. England and Denmark made their return to the Euro, having last participated in 2004, while Republic of Ireland returned after a twenty-four-year absence to make their second appearance at a European Championship. One of the co-hosts, Ukraine, made their debut as an independent nation (before 1992 Ukraine participated as part of the Soviet Union). With
Euro banknotes in the United Kingdom: Thomas De La Rue, a major private printer, and the Bank of England printing house, which does not produce euro banknotes. Unlike euro coins, euro notes do not have a national side indicating which country issued them. The country that issued them is not necessarily where they were printed. The information about the issuing country is encoded within the first character of each note's serial number instead. The first character of the serial number is a letter which uniquely identifies the country that issues the note. The remaining 11 characters are numbers which, when their digital