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The main risk, therefore, was of abuse of the improvised system. Since cheques were not being cleared, there was nothing in principle to prevent people writing cheques for amounts that they did not have. For the system to work, payees would have to take it on trust that payers’ cheques were not going to bounce—and all this when they had no clear idea whenthe banks would reopen and allow them to find out.
The Times
of London was following events over the Irish Sea with interest—and in July it noted both the extraordinary fact that nothing much seemed to have changed, and the apparent fragility of the situation. “Figures and trends which are available indicate that the dispute has not had an adverse effect on the economy so far,” wrote its correspondent. “This has been due to a number of factors, not least of which is the prudence which business has exercised against overspending.” But could the balancing act continue? “There is now, however, a psychological risk that if the dispute drags on, caution will be cast aside, particularly by smaller businesses.” 33
    Sure enough, cracks did begin to appear here and there. A month into the closure, there was a scare when some livestock markets announced that they would no longer accept private cheques. 34 In July, a farmer from Omagh who had been convicted of smuggling seven pigs into the Republic was unable to pay the £309 fine handed down to him, for want of ready cash. 35 And over the summer, the business lobby—encouraged by the banks and exasperated by the expenses they were incurring to find ways round the closure—began planting scare stories in the newspapers claiming, for example, that “a rapidly growing paralysis is spreading through the economy because of the banks dispute.” 36 But the evidence collated by the Central Bank of Ireland once the crisis was finally resolved in November 1970 showed quite the opposite. Their review of the closure concluded not only that “the Irish economy continued to function for a reasonably long period of time with its main clearing banks closed for business,” but that “the level of economic activity continued to increase” over the period. 37 Both before and after the event, it seemed unbelievable—but somehow, it had worked: for six and a half months, in one of the then thirty wealthiest economies in the world, “a highly personalized credit system without any definite time horizon for the eventual clearance of debits and credits substituted for the existing institutionalized banking system.” 38
    In the end, the main impediment imposed by this highly successful system turned out to be logistical. By the time the banks and their employees finally reached a new pay settlement, and it was announcedthat the banks would reopen on 17 November 1970, an enormous volume of uncleared cheques had accumulated with individuals and businesses. Advertisements were placed in the newspapers warning customers not to submit all of them at once, and forewarning that it was unlikely that account balances would be reconciled fully for several weeks. It was another three months—until mid-February, 1971—before matters had returned completely to normal. By then, a total of over £5 billion of uncleared cheques written during the period of the closure had been submitted for clearing. This was the money that the Irish public had made for itself while its banks were on strike.
    How had this apparent miracle of spontaneous economic co-operation come to pass? The general consensus after the event was that several features of Irish social life were uniquely conducive to its success: not least, that most famous feature of all, the Irish public house. The basic challenge was that of screening the creditworthiness of those paying by unclearable cheque. Ireland had an advantage in that communities, both in the countryside and in the cities, were close-knit. Individuals had personal knowledge of most of the people they transacted with, and