Vincent Boland: Will this pandemic be the death knell for the office as we knew it?

If workers end up in the future doing from home the jobs they did in offices up to last year, it opens up a fundamental debate on what exactly such a place is

Grand Canal Square in the Dublin Docklands, home to many of the city’s priciest offices which could soon find themselves redundant. Picture: Christian Charisius

A few days before construction workers returned to building sites in Dublin’s docklands last week after their long lockdown, one of Ireland’s biggest employers dropped a bit of a bombshell.

Allied Irish Banks told its 9,100 staff that the office as they know it – as their place of work five days a week, from Monday to Friday, from 9 to 5 – is about to be consigned to history.

In the post-pandemic world, the ...