Michael Noonan (Limerick City, Fine Gael)
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It is too soon to assume that the Irish banks need additional capital. The position at the end of 2012 was that the core tier 1 capital of AIB was 15.1%, that of Bank of Ireland was 14.4% and that of PTSB was 18%. When the stress testing was done in Spain and, more recently, in Cyprus, it was not done for 10.5% core tier 1 capital as was done in Ireland when we did stress tests. Stress testing for 9% was done. PTSB is double the capital requirement. As the banks look more closely at the impaired debt of SMEs and on the mortgage side, one will find they are well provisioned. AIB, for example, has €12 billion for impaired debts, which is a lot of capital.