3 Pounds Provincial Bank of Ireland

The Provincial Bank of Ireland was founded in 1825 by Thomas Joplin, the same reformer who had been pushing for joint-stock banking in Britain for years before legislation finally allowed it. Unlike the Bank of Ireland, the Provincial was explicitly designed to operate through a branch network outside Dublin — a deliberate structural choice that made it the dominant commercial bank across rural Ireland for much of the nineteenth century.

A 3-pound denomination is an oddity worth noting. Irish banking retained the £3 note long after it vanished from English practice, partly reflecting the persistence of older livestock and land transaction values in rural markets where £1 was too little and £5 too much.