Thanks for posting that. I did indeed miss your point. I think it's because the Irish Banking Crisis is generally the designation for the events of 2008+...while what happened in the 1970s is generally referred to, in my experience, as the Irish Banking Strike(s).
Funnily enough I know Antoin Murphy quite well (the economist quoted whose work the article uses as a central reference point). I don't think he'd object to me saying that he was sometimes known in his own circles as Dr Doom.
I wasn't alive during the banking strike, but my father was very active in business then. His observations on it are three fold:
1. Business in general moved quite slowly at the time. So although several months seems an amazing length of time without banking, it didn't seem that extreme at the time.
2. Ultimately the whole thing rested on the knowledge that the music would stop and everything would get settled (for good or ill) soon enough.
3. Cheque culture in Ireland (even up to today) is extremely lax compared to the US. Many people make a habit of bouncing cheques, post-dating cheques, cashing third party cheques, using unsigned cheques as a sort of rough escrow and so on...Writing a bad cheque is bad manners but it won't land you in jail. So we were primed to view cheques as a flexible currency.
