The scene is a bank in a small west of Ireland town in the late 1960s or early 1970s. It is a quiet, mid-week afternoon when the bank's area inspector arrives, unexpected and unannounced.
There are no customers in the public area. Nor does there appear to be any staff. But behind the frosted glass which gives on to the manager's private office the inspector can see the silhouettes of a group of people - he recognises some of the branch staff - playing cards around a low table.
The inspector goes behind the counter and presses the teller's panic button, sounding the alarm. There is no reaction from the card-players. But four or five minutes later, the barman from the pub next door arrives carrying a tray of pints, responding apparently to a time-tested signalling system of ordering drink on behalf of the card-school.
This highly-entertaining memoir of a reluctant banker is replete with such tales, starting with the young Ryan's induction in 1949 into the then Munster and Leinster Bank at South Mall in Cork. The medical examination consisted, as he recalls, of a "tap on the knee" after which he was launched on his career.
There is anecdote aplenty as the author recounts the vicissitudes of life on the lower slopes of the banking pyramid at a time when secure and respectable employment was hard to come by in Ireland. A wry, self-deprecating humour runs throughout. There is the hilarious tale of the night the author persuaded Brendan Behan to address the Bankers' Club in Dublin and Behan's subsequent unscheduled - and unruly - appearance in the elegant banking hall of the Dame Street branch. Meanwhile students of modern business methods will find themselves baffled by Ryan's account of Allied Irish Bank's first entry into the UK market - from a laundrette in the London suburb of Kilburn, with the author himself as one of the founding staffers.
Bob Ryan, however, was no conventional banker. In his alter ego he is an acclaimed painter whose work has featured in more than a dozen successful one-man exhibitions in Ireland and abroad. He is a former editor of Dublin Opinion, the satirical review, briefly revived in the 1980s. Perhaps most significantly in the context of this book he was the first Public Relations Manager to be appointed by Allied Irish Bank and held that position from 1970 to 1986.
The memoir may be read for entertainment and humour. But this is also an important book for its narrative of the transformation which swept through the Irish banking industry in the 1970s and 1980s.
When the author joined as a young clerk in 1949, a network of small, independent banks spanned the country, each with an affiliation and a client list deriving very largely from religion, politics or geography. Their recruitment tended to follow these affiliations too, thus confirming the identity of one bank as Protestant, another Catholic, one a countryperson's bank, another the bank of the prosperous business classes - and so on.
But by the late 1960s it was clear that these archaic delineations could not continue. Greater efficiencies, security and an improved range of services could be achieved by merging. Thus the two major groupings, Bank of Ireland and Allied Irish Bank, came together and the shape of today's retail banking network emerged.
For the men and women who staffed the banks at local level all was changing utterly too. The regular salary, high status and relatively privileged lifestyle became increasingly less distinctive in an Ireland which was rapidly industrialising, in which third-level education was becoming widely available and in which alternative career options were multiplying.
Two lengthy strikes in 1966 and 1970 finally saw the industry cross the bar into a new reality in which a job in the bank was no longer the mark of singular social distinction - and financial security - which it once had been.
Bob Ryan writes of this transitional process with sensitivity to the hurt and bruising visited upon many of his contemporaries. But he also chronicles with evident pride the resolution and professionalism with which the two main Irish banking groups then set about building their markets outside Ireland and becoming international players. There are insightful perspectives on successive chief executives and chairmen at AIB as well as many of the landmark events in the organisation's history from the 1970s: the move to Bankcentre; the initiation of the bank's unique and valuable art collection; significant sponsorships; the Insurance Corporation crisis of 1984; and so on.
At the end of the 1980s the author took retirement from the bank and became editor of Dublin Opinion while continuing his painting. For nine years he was marketing director of the registered charity Cerebral Palsy Ireland. By any measure this is a life lived to the full and the book reflects it well.
Conor Brady is Editor of The Irish Times
