From The Generalist Academy:
At the end of the 1960s, the cost of living went up a lot in Ireland. Most employers increased workers’ wages to account for this increase, but the four major Irish banks (the “Big Four”) did not. So the banking staff went on strike… and it was an enormous strike. All unionised banking staff, in all the banks in Ireland, stopped working at the start of May, 1970. They stayed on strike for more than six months.
1970, of course, is well before digital banking. Cash and cheques were the primary means of buying and selling. And, all of a sudden, no-one could get any money out of (or into) their bank accounts. Houses could not change hands because the property deeds were all locked up. You would expect the whole country to go into a kind of economic and social meltdown. But, against all odds, it did not.
Instead of disaster, the people of Ireland began writing each other promissory notes and custom cheques. And these notes became a kind of currency of their own, moving between people who took the cheques’ value on faith. For cash, pubs became the central clearing house: people would cash their cheques in the pub and then stay to have a drink. Win-win. And because the pub was such a central part of the local community, they could operate on a trust model very effectively.
It was not, of course, a perfect system. Without access to bank records, people could make promises they could not keep:....
....MUCH MORE
