Lyonsie.
I have successfully paid French invoices with cheques from an Irish Bank. It seems to work smoothly, there was no additional charges.
Given that you can transfer money via IBAN directly (and ususally online) into an account without any hassle of paper cheques and posting etc I wonder why you would not use this method instead! MBNA cheques (as far as I know) were issued with MBNA credit cards and attract the same interest as a CC cash withdrawal. Therefore the fees are probably prohibitive.
Actually, cheques are better because they are protected from [broken link removed]. Intermediate banks in the UK will simply grab an unannounced fee from the transfer, and less money shows up in the beneficiaries account. Account holders have little control over this. But with cheques, the postman has no way to grabbing a little bit for his part, and the full amount makes it to the recipient. If the recipients bank takes a fee for foreign cheque deposits, the recipient can easily verify, and has enough control to be able to use another bank before the fee is taken. Moreover, the recipient cannot complain to the payer that less money arrived!
Candyflipper - there may be some element of the above when a credit transfer involves a change of currency - but a transfer between Ireland and France does not.
Under current regulations, assuming that the amount is less than €50,000 there should be no difference in charges between a transfer Dublin to Mullingar compared with a transfer Dublin to Marseilles. In Irish banks, the charge is normally less than €1. For the relevant legislation see [broken link removed]