Country Living with Francis Farragher

I’m not sure whether it was a good sign or not but there was a time, when I’d know the local bank managers by their first names. In the great scheme of things, most of the ‘business deals’ struck would be about loans for cars or farm investment while of course the big one was the mortgage.

Whether we were naive or not at the time, there was a kind of trust between banks and ordinary customers that was always nurtured by that face-to-face contact element. It was reassuring to know a name or a face for a bit of advice or maybe to get a few bob to get you out of some financial hole that you had dug for yourself.

There was a time too back in the 1970s when the average Irish Mammy could envisage no better job for a son or a daughter than to ‘get the start’ in the bank. It was the ultimate position of respectability, even if most of the days might be spent – to borrow a phrase from WB Yeats – ‘fumbling in a greasy till’.

I remember thumbing a lift to Athlone to sit an exam for the Bank of Ireland but whether it was my dodgy maths or my even dodgier appearance, I never heard another word about it. My career in respectable banking never managed to leave the starting blocks.

On a Richter scale of life’s regrets, it doesn’t even get a zero rating, although here and there, I’d be reminded of some of the junkets that lads I went to school with got from their bank employers. And then there were the years when we’d never be poor again with loans – the bigger the better – being handed out for all kinds of property deals.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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