5 Pounds Provincial Bank of Ireland

The Provincial Bank of Ireland was incorporated by royal charter in 1825 specifically to compete with the Bank of Ireland's near-monopoly outside Dublin. By the late 1920s it was operating as a well-established commercial issuer under the Irish Free State, which had chosen to retain the private note-issuing rights of the existing chartered banks rather than centralize currency immediately — a political compromise that kept notes like this in circulation well into the 1930s.

The four-year window between the Robertson and Forde signatures coincides with the bank's absorption of several smaller provincial branches during a period of rural consolidation following agricultural deflation. High-denomination notes from this issuer in this period survive far less often than the lower values, simply because £5 was too large a sum for everyday hoarding.