Opinion

‘Of course I remember the bank strikes,’ my mother says. ‘Your dad took to carrying a gun’

Ireland’s economy didn’t collapse when the banks shut for long periods in the 1960s and 1970s; instead, local shopkeepers and publicans acted as ‘a second level of banking’. But don’t romanticise it too much

'There was nowhere to deposit the float from his pub at the end of the day, so my father took to carrying the money home – with a gun.' File photograph of a portrait of JFK on the wall of a pub: Bryan O'Brien
'There was nowhere to deposit the float from his pub at the end of the day, so my father took to carrying the money home – with a gun.' File photograph of a portrait of JFK on the wall of a pub: Bryan O'Brien
Rachel O'Dwyer
Mon Jan 13 2025 - 05:57

In Ireland in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the banks went on strike, sometimes for months at a time. Unions demanded better wages and working conditions. One strike, from May to October, 1970, was among the longest in modern history. An earlier one, in 1966, lasted for 12 weeks.

The banks closed and there was no money, but the economy didn’t collapse. Instead, local shopkeepers and publicans came forward and acted as “a second level of banking” in the place of the State. At first, they cashed real cheques, but soon it was just plain old IOUs scrawled on paper, no more official than a spit and a handshake. They could do this, the story goes, because everyone knew everyone else. If there’s community – if there’s trust – you don’t need money.

So what lessons can we learn from the bank strikes? What is this story really about?

One lesson we can take away concerns the strength of local economies. When the Irish banks closed it seemed immediately obvious that the whole system would collapse. Instead, the strikes became a global economic case study. They showed the resilience of local economies when a central money issuer was absent. They showed how the Irish nation could adapt to an economic curve ball.

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Could a similar localism today offset the vulnerabilities that have come, first with Brexit and now with the spectre of Donald Trump’s second tenancy in the White House? In light of Trump’s protectionist economic policies and their potential impact on foreign direct investment in Ireland, we may need to reduce our dependence on external economies and multinational corporations.

[ Donald Trump’s economic plan: the key areas for Ireland ]

The banking strikes not only highlight our latent adaptability in moments of crisis, they also foreground the value of local communities. Strengthening local economies could buffer against the shocks of global economic crises, such as supply-chain disruptions or financial market volatility. By investing in local businesses, promoting local production and encouraging community-based financial systems, Ireland might build resilience against external economic pressures.

But wait, there’s more to this story.

My father owned a pub in Kilkenny at the time. “Do you remember the bank strikes?” I asked my mother recently. “What were they like?” I was looking for tales of the good old country, of a community that pulled together. “Of course I remember,” she said. “Your dad took to carrying a gun on his way home.”

While community trust and embracing the local can be good in a crisis, we might also want to think about what our trust is made of, about who ‘the local’ includes, and who it leaves in the dark

“Sorry,” I said, pulled from my misty-eyed reverie, “a gun?” There was nowhere to deposit the float at the end of the day, she went on. “Businesses were incredibly vulnerable to theft.” I pictured the road that winds from the pub on the hill to the house where I was born. It was dark and deserted. My father appeared in my vision, carrying a giant hemp money sack in one hand and a hunting rifle in the other. No, I decided, this was not the story I was after.

By 1976, when a third strike loomed, many businesses that had been left holding worthless paper promises in 1970 now bore signs in their windows: “Sorry. No Cheques Accepted”.

It’s easy to romanticise the local economies of a postcolonial society such as Ireland, but it’s often a mistake. What looks like goodwill is also a type of insurance, a way to manage the risks posed by those who are less fortunate than us, or by those we don’t know. The communal spirit of the Irish publican also acts through what James C Scott has called the “abrasive force of gossip and envy, and the knowledge that the abandoned poor are likely to be a real and present danger to better-off villagers”.

Villagers like my father, maybe, cashing an IOU in business hours, but carrying a gun into the night. Another lesson from the banking strike, then, is that while community trust and embracing the local can be good in a crisis, we might also want to think about what our trust is made of, about who “the local” includes, and who it leaves in the dark. As anti-immigration and far-right sentiment gains ground in modern Ireland, it’s always worth checking what stories we forget when we glorify the good old days when everyone knew their neighbours.

Tech bros the world over love the story of the Irish bank strikes because it shows us alternatives to publicly mandated money. For those who feel that markets are not a matter for the state – Musk and Trump among them – this story suggests other ways to do business. One of the takeaways from the bank strikes is that money is a proxy for trust. If there’s enough of the latter you don’t really need the former. The Bitcoin whitepaper, published in 2008, outlines a technical “system for electronic transactions without relying on trust”. It delegates the messy business of trust to technology.

[ The rise of anti-immigrant ‘community watchdogs’ across Ireland ]

The bank strikes is a story about trust, then, about local versus monolithic forces, but it’s also a story about automation, the automation of jobs and the automation of human-seeming faculties like gut intuition, social ties and taking the measure of those around you. The bank tellers were campaigning for wage increases and they finally got them in 1970, but one of the key outcomes of the second bank strike was that banks began to invest in automated teller machines and other technologies to reduce their reliance on human labour power.

The bank strikes is a story about the might of the people when they pull together, then, but it’s also a story of the march of machines. Walk into any bank in a rural town today and you’ll be met with rows of them. It’s strangely silent.

Rachel O’Dwyer is a writer and lecturer in digital cultures in the National College of Art and Design, Dublin. She’s the author of Tokens: The Future of Money in the Age of the Platform