Margaret Rossiter Column - Is hard cash a thing of the past?

It was a story told to Joe Duffy on his midday RTE’s ‘Liveline’ programme, the subsequent discussion on which I was unable to listen to, so this is just a brief recital of the subject of that story. It seems that a man (the teller of the story) went to Spain to have some eye surgery (which cost less than Ireland). When he had recovered he went to the airport to return home. A flight was immediately available at a RyanAir cost of €46. He produced the money immediately, in ordinary cash, but this was unacceptable. He was asked to pay by bank card but he did not have a bank card. He did not have a bank account.

I did not hear the sequence to this story but it seems he had to sleep on the footpath until some form of rescue arrived. In this, he was probably not unlike many of his contemporaries: a retired old man who had worked hard all his life, never had any spare money to open a bank account and was now living on a small pension. His trip to Spain had probably taken a long period of “sparing-up.”

Margaret Rossiter Column: The rescuers and the restorers

It seems to me that the story raises some important issues. First, there is the inflexibility of big business which seems unable or unwilling to accommodate the lack of know-how of old age and the technologies of “online” banking and computer booking. Even that most conservative institution of State, the Collector of Taxes, is now recommending that we pay our taxes “online.”
This assumes the possession of computer equipment and the expertise to use it, all of which may well be beyond the capacity of many older people. There is also the question of attitudes. Has helpfulness been sacrificed to speed and so-called efficiency.
Is the sidelining of hard cash (the stuff that once-upon-a-time rattled in our pockets) and its replacement by a plastic bank card adding yet more to our cost-of-living? How much will that cost us?

This column had just reached its fifth paragraph when the morning RTE news announced that hard cash - notes and coinage - was to be phased out. This raises many questions. We live in a democracy - or so we are told. Did any political party advocate for this policy in presenting an agenda for government? They did not. So who made the decision? One has to presume it was the banks. Was there any consultation with ordinary customers? Was there any consultation with people who live on a very limited income - “from hand to mouth” and who do not have a bank account, like the man in the Spanish airport.

This was, it seems, an arbitrary decision made by the powerful financial institutions. Its consequences on that strata of society, the poor, and those living on a very limited income, does not matter, because the banks will always run happily to the bank!