The doormat at Bank of Ireland, Shannon Town Centre, reads: "Improved customer service is our aim." But the branch's closure next month will have the opposite effect on residents and businesses in the area.
"It seems to be the trend," says Annette Moloney, who was lodging money at the bank this week for her mother. "Every time you go in, there is a service cancelled."
On the windows are advertisements for motor loans. Would you love a new car? Many would, if only to make it to the Shannon Free Zone industrial estate, a mile away, where the nearest counter service will be. There is another branch at the airport two miles away.
It's not pedestrian-friendly country. Shannon's main thoroughfare is designed to keep cars moving quickly.
That the bank is closing a branch in a busy shopping centre is strange. The centre is at the heart of an area with a customer base of 10,000 people. Customers shop in Tesco or in the newly opened Lidl, use the post office and avail of one of three banks represented there. Across the aisle from Bank of Ireland is Ulster Bank. A short distance away is AIB, which is expanding its premises, taking over a unit formerly occupied by First Active Building Society.
Catherine Kiely, who works in a florist's at the centre, has been with Bank of Ireland for the past 30 years. She says she will probably be changing banks.
"We got letters," say Gillian Walsh and Sandra Harmon, who work in Tesco and who describe the annoyance of not being able to use the bank during their lunch hour. "They are leaving the Pass machines. We are still allowed to use them."
Customers, in fact, are being encouraged to adopt telephone and online banking. Rita McCormack, a pensioner, says she is very disappointed. "It is very central here. I like the staff too."
She has banked there for the past 10 years and will have to rely on a family member to bring her to the industrial estate. Dolly McAuley from the nearby village of Newmarket-on-Fergus, where there is no bank, will now go either to Ennis or the industrial estate. She wonders how long the queues will be in those branches.
The chairman of Clare County Council, Sean Hillery, runs a pharmacy in the town centre. Many of his customers are elderly people who arrive in with the prescriptions and have their pensions paid into the bank.
"They will not be able to manage new banking technologies and feel vulnerable to thieves if they attempt to use a Pass machine. It is exposing old people and it is upsetting them. The bank never made money out of them. That is the sad reality."
