Ever since the start of the global financial crisis and the subsequent great recession, Irish banks have been at the forefront of the Euro area’s banking regulators concerns, with sector longer-term profitability and financial sustainability. With mortgages arrears and other legacy of the global financial crisis now waning, more recent attention has shifted away from blaming the strategic defaulters for the banks’ woes, to pointing the finger at legacy borrowers with tracker mortgages, regulatory increases in the cost of bank capital, and the alleged negative effects of the ECB’s exceptionally loose monetary policy. Meanwhile, the banks’ position in the Irish…