This is absolutely fascinating. Didn't know about the Irish bank strikes till now. I wonder why then in 'prepping' discussions there's always talk about "imagine what's going to happen once the banks come down??" and it's like ... people will just write IOU cheques to each other? Of course, I think other factors could be at play that spared Ireland from catastrophe, like ethnic homogeneity of a society leading to greater levels of social trust. (Whereas less homogeneous ones may not have that, but maybe there's other trust factors that override it?) Who knows - haven't had bank outages here in the US yet to find out.