5 Pounds Bank of Ireland

Bank of Ireland 5 Pound notes of this period were issued under the continuing authority of the bank's original 1783 charter — a private institution with note-issuing rights that predated any central banking framework in Ireland by over a century. The period 1910–1918 brackets the Home Rule crisis, the Easter Rising of 1916, and the early years of the First World War, all of which placed unusual strain on Irish banking confidence without triggering the kind of runs or emergency overprints that affected some continental issuers.

Surviving examples from this series are scarcer than their English contemporaries largely because Irish provincial hoarding patterns differed sharply from British ones — higher-denomination notes tended to move through commercial channels and return to the bank relatively quickly for cancellation.