10 Pounds Bank of Ireland

The Bank of Ireland received its charter in 1783, making it one of the earliest chartered banks in the British Isles, predating Catholic Emancipation and operating under considerable constitutional restriction. By 1804 the bank had recently moved into its permanent home in the former Parliament House on College Green — a building vacated when the Acts of Union dissolved the Irish Parliament in 1800 and transferred legislative authority to Westminster. The irony of a bank occupying the seat of a dissolved legislature was not lost on contemporaries.

Early nineteenth-century Bank of Ireland notes of this denomination are genuinely scarce. The ten-pound figure put these well above everyday transactions, limiting circulation to merchants and landed interests. Attrition among high-denomination early paper was severe.