100 Pounds Bank of Ireland

The Bank of Ireland's £100 note of this period was a high-denomination instrument with limited public exposure — at a time when average industrial wages in Ireland ran well under £50 per week, these notes moved primarily between businesses and financial institutions rather than through ordinary retail hands. Survival rates for used examples are lower than the raw scarcity of the issue might suggest, simply because heavily circulated high-denomination notes were typically returned to the bank and destroyed rather than retained.

Chestnutt served as Governor and O'Neill as Chief Cashier during the overlap of this signing period, which spans the years immediately preceding Ireland's full decimalisation consolidation and the turbulence of the 1970s oil-shock inflation.