Ceisteanna ó Cheannairí - Leaders' Questions Dail Éireann — 2021-02-18 ============================================================ Leo Varadkar (FG), Dublin West Nobody likes to see a bank branch close in a town. We need to be honest and realistic, however. The world has moved on. The number of people who go into a bank branch now is a fraction of what it was ten or 20 years ago, and the number will keep falling. Most purchases in Ireland now are happening electronically. Even places where a person could not use a card before and where they only took cash, they sometimes now only take a card. Older people, by and large, have adopted and adapted to that change in technology, much more so than many people give them credit for. That is the truth of the way in which the world is moved on. I represent a constituency with 120,000 or 130,000 people. There are two, perhaps three, banks in the entire constituency. It is not that people travel to other parts of Dublin or other parts of Meath or Louth to use those branches. People are managing money in a totally different way and----- --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2021-02-18/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:49:04+00:00 Sitting date: 2021-02-18