"I'm not saying that banks crashing isn't bad, but it wasn't a problem for Ireland to have banks disappear"
but the thing is, according to the article, trust in banks never disappeared, neither did the banks. People kept writing cheques against their bank accounts. There was a clear expectation that banks would open with all money intact and cheques would be processed.
That is a very different scenario from a bank failing.
What the article describes is nothing of the sort. It was a strike, which is a breakdown of operations, not insolvency.
If someone owes you or I money and then suddenly they go on strike there will be a vicious reckoning.
I suspect everyone assumed normality would resume "tomorrow", for a lot of tomorrows. Which is the other reason you can't just start up the lynchings, this isn't America and you'll have to live with these people and their families on a comparatively small island.
And even given that, the banks did not actually fail, they just weren’t operating, and the expectation was that they would start back up again at some point. When Ireland actually faced the banks failing, in 2008, we bailed them out and nationalised most of them, at a cost of almost 10,000 euro per capita.
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFIQWWt4UaA
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_bank_strikes_(1966–1976)
Given the extremely low quality of this article, and given that the author is a finance editor rather than some freelance contributor to Business Insider, I very much hope that HN readers would stop upvoting submissions from Business Insider in the future.
Getting people to strike isn't trivial, but this is the first time I learn about bankers striking.
So there were clerks and cashiers at every level pushing paper, crunching numbers, handling cash. These people were clearly working class, not the later Wall Street image conjured by the word "banker".
1970 Ireland isn’t exactly an example of a modern or booming economy.
But… what happened there should give pause when financial bros get weepy and pat themselves on the back about their sacred duty to provide liquidity at all costs. (And take a vig)
Going further back, pubs were the local shops for general dry goods, particularly in rural communities. I recall some dusty window displays in some pubs even in the 1980s, when I was a kid.
Same thing in the border counties up north - you can often spend or exchange Sterling and Euro currency, but the rates will suck.
In the 1990’s where I grew up, one of the two shops in the village was basically a room off one of the pubs. The other, larger shop was also the post office, hardware store, etc.
> ‘They are mostly strangers to us, and we just have to play it by ear in deciding whether to accept a cheque’, said an official.”
Sounds like a recipe for discrimination and inequality, which isn't mentioned in either article.
Although that doesn't cover gender or class discrimination so I suppose that was still an issue.
However, in 1970, people here just weren’t all that ‘banked’; when I was a kid in the late 80s/early 90s, it was still fairly common for people to not have bank accounts, and certainly in 1970 postal savings accounts would have been more common than bank accounts. Today they’re ~universal (very few employers would consider paying by any means other than bank transfer) but it was a different story 50 years ago.
It destroys what this site is for, so we end up having to ban accounts that keep doing it.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
That is, it's not only the common experience that matters, but the outliers too. The basic tools of society should be available even if you're ugly, annoying, or a minority.
1. What was the extent of the strike? Did salaries still get deposited? Did inter company transfer go through? Did exchanges stay open? Did lines of credit for businesses small and large stay open?
2. The whole "we knew who had money and we didn't deal with strangers" makes me suspect there's a whole other side of this particular story.
https://bankunderground.co.uk/2016/01/20/the-cheque-republic...
Some world-class puns there.
