BALLYBAY’S ONLY ATM WAS OUT OF ORDER FOR THREE WEEKENDS IN A ROW

Cllr Gilmour reiterated that this was taking shoppers out of the town. Many would be likely to move on to Castleblayney, Monaghan, Carrickmacross or somewhere else to do their shopping.
Cllr Traynor said the ATM had in fact been out of action for three of the four weekends in December. Backing Cllr Hamilton’s call to seek a meeting with the regional manager, he said this was something that should happen “very shortly”, because the situation was affecting the people of the town and drastically affecting all the businesses of the town.
EVERY TIME A BAD TIME
Cllr Hamilton said that while Christmas and December was a bad time for this to be happening, the reality was that every time was a bad time to have no ATM in a town. Whether it was St Patrick’s weekend, Easter, or coming into the summer when there might be some tourists passing through who might stop to buy something, no time of the year was a good time to be without the facility. Town Mayor Gene Duffy said the local ATM was also very essential for people who could not drive or had no access to public transport. It was a “crazy situation” to have the town depending on just one such machine.
Michael Smyth said the ATM was a facility that banks were providing to the community as well as just to their customers. The banks should see it in that light, as they had “done very well in recent years out of the taxpayer”. They should be willing to repair ATMs quickly, as a measure of goodwill to their customers and local communities, he said.