Glenamaddy's home-grown banking

GLENAMADDY once boasted two banks, and their abandonment of the community — one in 2006 and the other in 2013 — heralded dire predictions from some quarters of the town’s inevitable economic demise.
Business would follow the banks’ customers to the larger towns and Glen’ would atrophy and die. That’s what the pessimists said, in a 21st-century version of John Healy’s 'No One Shouted Stop — Death of an Irish Town’ which he based on his native Charlestown in the 1960s when emigration was bleeding the life from it and so many other West of Ireland communities.
However, instead of lying down and accepting their fate, the people of Glenamaddy rallied around and created their own hybrid banking system, an unusual but very pragmatic utilisation of the Credit Union, the Post Office and links to financial institutions, which has filled the void left by the departing banks.

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