Irish Bank Note Videos and Reminiscences

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m_ok
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Irish Bank Note Videos and Reminiscences

Post by m_ok »

Some bank note videos from RTE archive.

1969 Banking in Ireland with clip of sealed bundles of 1,000 Lavery £1 notes at old central
ww w.rte.ie/archives/2014/1010/651350-banking-in-ireland-in-1969

1976 New £5 design
ww w.rte.ie/archives/2016/1025/826731-new-five-pound-note

1976 New £5 note in circulation
ww w.rte.ie/archives/2016/1027/827368-new-five-pound-note

1980 First ATM in Ireland
ww w.rte.ie/archives/2013/0213/367564-first-atm-in-ireland-1980

1983 Forged Five Pound Notes
ww w.rte.ie/archives/2018/1114/1010863-forged-bank-notes-seized

1994 New £5 Note
ww w.rte.ie/archives/2014/0415/608794-new-5-note-for-ireland-1994

1993 New Ten Pound Note
ww w.rte.ie/archives/2018/0827/987797-james-joyce-on-new-tenner

2002 Euro notes
ww w.rte.ie/archives/2016/1221/840464-euro-single-currency

2006 George Best bank notes
ww w.rte.ie/archives/2016/1103/828854-george-best-bank-notes
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Re: Irish Bank Note Videos

Post by DOC »

Fascinating, thanks for sharing.
I particularly liked the video of the first ATM !
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Re: Irish Bank Note Videos

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Nice one there!
I remember the introduction of ATMs in 1980!
The 1969 one shows the vault in Bank of Ireland in College Green
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Re: Irish Bank Note Videos

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Great Videos , thanks for sharing
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Re: Irish Bank Note Videos

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Central Bank Documentary: Robert Ballagh – Designing the C Series Banknotes

ww w.youtube.com/embed/StRzg3FBBDw
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Re: Irish Bank Note Videos

Post by Jenny007 »

Thanks for sharing... a great video and brings a whole new appreciation to me for the Series C notes. I feel like a lot of the detail of the notes is lost due to the smaller size of these notes, and I always wished they were the same size as the Series B. The latter still is my favorite and my generation ( the unmistakable blue £20 in your wallet meant you were set for a good night out on the town)
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Thanks. great video with interesting anecdotes which brings this note issue to life !
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Very nice find. I will add it to the main website!
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Jenny007 wrote: 17 Oct 2020 12:49 Thanks for sharing... a great video and brings a whole new appreciation to me for the Series C notes. I feel like a lot of the detail of the notes is lost due to the smaller size of these notes, and I always wished they were the same size as the Series B. The latter still is my favorite and my generation ( the unmistakable blue £20 in your wallet meant you were set for a good night out on the town)
We thought that at the time they were introduced in 1992 that they 'did'nt feel like money', but that said, in the period of the design process of Series B (1971 to 1976), the buying power of the currency halved, and then in the period of the circulation from 1976 to 1995, the buying power of the currency dropped by three quarters again. I'd to point that out to my Grandmother (born 1919), that a Twenty Pound note of 1992 had much the buying power of the 10 Shilling note of her childhood. Hence the size reduction and that we were really catching up with the rest of Europe, but more than that again, preparing for 30 years ahead. The Series C was - in terms of size - Deutschmark sized.

In other words, the Twenty Pound note, as conceived and issued in January 1980 had a buying power of around 140 Euro, and by November 1992 50 Euro or so in todays terms.

I thought they 'overdid' the size reduction, but then - I'd say they were considering a series to have a circulation period of 30+ years. Retrofits with holograms, and additional modifications were'nt 'built in', I've seen other currencies have those, but had the Euro not come about, series C would be obsolete by 2003, and would require replacement/modification, likely involving holograms which would be difficult to incorporate without a size increase. The tilting latent image feature area would become a holographic patch.
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Re: Irish Bank Note Videos

Post by Mac »

Yes, you were well set with a Yeats £20 in your pocket!

When the C Series came out first, we were all examining the new notes for security features. The introduction of microprinting was one of the main differences between the B and C Series.
Just had a look at a few now, and noticed a little asymmetry in the £20 note design which was probably put in as a security feature!
£50 remains my favourite C Series note.
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I remember the first C series note I saw was the £20 from an ATM at about 8am on the first day of issue. I hadn’t seen anything about them apart from someone telling me on the Saturday that they had featured on the news on the previous Friday. To be honest my first concerns weren’t with the overall designs. It was to see if it still had two signatures, a serial number with letter prefix and most importantly that there was a date. 🙄
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I remember I got my first C Series notes were a couple of days after the first issue. I got three BBB £20 notes from the local cashier who was keeping replacements for me: two dated 21.09.92, and a third dated 10.09.92! A rarity from day one.

I remember the notes being very small.
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Should we start a thread on peoples memories and observations on Irish notes from experience. For example times between new dates appearing, how often older different signature combinations appeared, I got very interested in, or possibly obsessed by notes around 1986. My local shops used to allow me to go through their tills and look at what dates were circulating. I was at that for about two or three years and during that time only ever found one 1977 £1 in circulation. 1978 were maybe one in three or four hundred. 1979 the same. 1980 about one in two hundred. 1981 was about one in one hundred. 82, 83 and 84 more scarce than 81.
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Re: Irish Bank Note Videos

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My father had a single M&L Ploughman £1 in his wallet for many years - it was the only time he ever came across one and he worked in a ballroom for nearly 25 years for his sins too. I still have that seed note. That was enough for me to start collecting them in my 30s. I just wish I'd started 20 years sooner for obvious reasons.

My smaller interest in Series A notes really stems from going with my mother to collect the children's allowance in the local PO - now sadly closed as of February 2019 - and seeing those crisp mid-70s Series A £1s and £5s being handed across and then the transition in the mid-70s to Maeve and Scotus notes.

Both ballroom and PO were in Dromkeen, Co. Limerick!

LN.
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Re: Irish Bank Note Videos and Reminiscences

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JohnnyQ wrote: 26 Oct 2020 20:14Should we start a thread on peoples memories and observations on Irish notes from experience.
Good idea—I modified the thread title a little!

I remember the B Series being introduced in 1976. Everyone was complaining about the new fiver. I was in school then and never managed to oven a whole fiver before the £1 note came out the following year.
I did manage to own a few of those one Christmas. I was collecting notes by then and got a nice run of around four crisp new £1 notes in sequence, which were carefully kept in a box, and then spent. I have made up for it since though!
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My £1 memories are the following. I was obsessed with everything about them, tiny size differences, tiny colour variances. Now I know that there are reasonable tolerances in all banknote production. There is a watermark variant on 06.01.86 and 19.02.86. It’s not huge. One is normal, the other one is more of an outline then the normal one. I spent months trying to tie it down to certain numbers and prefixes but couldn’t. I missed 24.04.87 for ages by only casually looking at the date and not realising it had changed. There was a huge wait for the new signature Maurice Doyle note to come out. I had seen the £20 first and strangely 01.03.88 tenner before the 22.12.87 tenner. I remember the excitement (sad) of getting my first Doyle £1 and the biggest thing that struck me was the paper difference and the fact that it had been fully reingraved and was a much crisper printing than the previous printings. After that there isn’t much more. Just plodding through the dates as they were released. Last thing I remember is that in the last year of their circulation there was a new first prefix letter issued weekly. I know this because my mother collected a widows pension from the post office every Friday and always got a new £1. She would put one in her pension book for me each week in case I didn’t have the date already.
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I had fun with 22.04.87 and 24.04.87 too. It was ages before I had realised that the date had changed, and that I had missed a date—I kept thinking I had the note already whenever I got a 24.04.87. Very sneaky of the Central Bank to put out two notes with only slightly different dates on them.
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The C series I suppose is the one I was most used to handling having joined the bank in 1996. One of the things that I do remember is how awkward it was handling money during the change from the B to the C series. Because the ten and twenty were changed first it was strange having a tiny twenty on the outside of a bundle and a massive fiver on top. Nothing really interesting at the start of the C series. Usually only £5, £10 and £20s used. Very rare to see a fifty in 1996 and same with the hundred. After a few years you saw a few of both until 2001 when ATMs were altered to use fifty’s. You never saw a full block as it was more than the limit for trip from the van to the branch. So they were usually split in two by the cash centre and strapped with bailing straps. Also as they were bulk issued at the same time when the countries ATMs were altered the first batch hadn’t worn out before the euro arrived. The big upset was the change of the serial number to the latter half of the alphabet. I was really surprised when I saw the first one and rang you straight away. We couldn’t decide if it was a forgery or a test note. I got a few error notes during that time. One was a new £20 that a customer withdrew from the ATM. Realised it had no security thread and demanded a new one. I gladly swapped her one for one of my own. 😁 The only other interesting note I got was from a customer lodging £1000. £900 was tenners and one £100 note. I thought to myself the £100 will be boring so I will get looking at the tenners first. Afterwards I realised the £100 was KKK 0000005.
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The packaging was standard until just before the euro. New notes packed in sequence in a block of 1000 notes, card on either side, one bailing strap down the middle and then shrink wrapped. They weren’t bundled within the block. Used notes from the CBI were wrapped in 100s with a brown paper strap. Then cardboard on either end of front and back coloured the same main colour of the note. Just before the euro came in the last few months of pounds were packaged a little like euro notes. New notes were not in sequence, wrapped in bundles of 100 and then shrink wrapped in 1000 notes. The euro notes were delivered about a week before their introduction. There was a crazy amount of fivers and tenners front loaded. If we normally used 1000 fivers a week we got something like 30,000 fivers. Just about all of them got returned within a few weeks. It’s also strange that you see early series numbers, as in the 100s for all Irish notes except fivers. It’s almost like there were millions and millions produced at the start and never issued.
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JohnnyQ wrote: 03 Dec 2020 16:51Very rare to see a fifty in 1996 and same with the hundred.
I remember putting a huge amount of effort into getting UNC examples of the C Series £50 and £100 notes when they came out first, and into getting UNC replacement notes of them also. I did the rounds of around 30 banks in Dublin and Galway! Good fun.
JohnnyQ wrote: 03 Dec 2020 16:51Afterwards I realised the £100 was KKK 0000005.
That's the way to get them! KKK 000005 remains the lowest number I have seen. RRR 000003 also got kept.
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