Three local bank closures dubbed ‘absolute disaster' for the county

The decision by Bank of Ireland to close three branches in Offaly as part of a major restructuring process has been branded as “an absolute disaster” by the county’s IFA Chairman.

Richard Scally said the decision will leave many people living in rural parts of the county feeling “totally abandoned and isolated” due to poor broadband connectivity, a lack of public transport and an inability to engage in online banking.

“This is just another slap in the face for rural Ireland,” said Mr Scally, who added that many IFA members across the county, particularly those in the older age categories, “don’t know how to use internet banking and many of them wouldn’t even trust the whole process of doing their financial business online.”

Coming on top of last week’s decision by Ulster Bank to withdraw from the Irish market, Richard Scally said it is of major concern that competition in the banking market is being reduced bit by bit, and he said this will have “serious implications” for business people and ordinary customers. As part of the announcement on Monday of this week that Bank of Ireland are to close 103 branches across the country, two Offaly towns, Clara and Banagher, will now be left with no bank. The third town to lose its Bank of Ireland branch is Edenderry.

Clara businessman, Deasún Baggot, who is the Manager of Baggot’s Centra, said his family have suffered “a double whammy” with the news that their local branch of the Bank of Ireland is to close in September. “We used to do all our business with Ulster Bank, and when they withdrew from Clara in 2014 we switched to Bank of Ireland, but for well over a year now we could see that less and less services were available in the local branch, so we used to go to Moate, and now that branch is closing as well, so we are caught on all fronts.”

The Baggot family has been in business for over 60 years, and Deasún says “more and more barriers” are being put up for businesspeople all the time.

“This decision of the Bank of Ireland, coming in the middle of a pandemic where so many businesses have suffered so many losses, is just very unfair,” he said.

For the past year, business people in Clara were unable to access a raft of services from their local branch of Bank of Ireland, with the vast majority of customers being directed towards automated machines or being encouraged to conduct all their transactions online.

“We couldn’t even get change for our business in the Clara branch, so we either had to go to Tullamore or Moate, but it could be a one hour round trip for me to go to Tullamore, queue up in the very busy bank branch there, and get back here to the shop, so we used to slip over to Moate, and now we can’t even do that, the whole thing is a disaster for business,” he said.

Bank of Ireland has stated that they have entered into a partnership with An Post to provide bank services in all the towns affected by branch closures, but Deasún Baggot says the Post Office in Clara is “already a very busy place” and he will be looking for “a reduction in banking charges” if he has to use that.

“It is the only option open to us at this stage, but we would need to hear a whole lot more detail from the bank.”