Call the fat lady: Ireland’s banking horror show must end now. Its four surviving banks require €24bn of new capital after Thursday’s stress test results. That brings the amount of public money poured down the drain since 2008 to €70bn – 45 per cent of gross domestic product. Ireland’s pension reserves will supply €17.5bn of the injection; the rest comes from its international bail-out. With equity investors already wiped out; the question is whether senior bondholders should share the burden. Regardless, the Irish know their banks will haunt them for a generation.

Allied Irish needs €13.3bn, Bank of Ireland €5.2bn, Irish Life €4bn and EBS €1.5bn. Is this the end of the problem? Not necessarily; Anglo Irish and Irish Nationwide, two bust banks, may still need more (they were not part of this latest stress test). The Irish authorities’ record in assessing the scale of the banking crisis is wretched, so there are grounds for continued scepticism.

Still, the tests were stringent, including stressing individual mortgages. Irish house prices have fallen 38 per cent from their peak at the end of 2006; the central bank’s baseline scenario is that they will have fallen 55 per cent by the end of 2012. The benchmark used in the stress tests was the US state of Nevada, where Standard & Poor’s estimates that house prices fell by 58 per cent from their peak in April 2006.