Bank of Ireland stood out in yesterday’s NAMA nightmare as being the one firm not to announce worse-than-expected capital requirements. However, today’s dire results expose the depth of its current crisis, and reducing staff numbers remains at the core of its ongoing cost-cutting regime.

Since the March 2008, around 2,200 staff (or 13% of headcount) have departed from Bank of Ireland. Over 1,000 of these have gone over the last 12 months, and employee numbers now stand at 15,786.

This is the result of an ongoing recruitment and pay freeze, and a policy of not replacing employees who leave rather than any redundancy announcements. But it has also run down its UK mortgage business and some corporate banking functions in international markets.

The savings the bank has achieved through this are considerable – staff costs are down by €376m on the previous 12 months.

Nonetheless, the headline figures coming out of BoI remain grim. The bank slid €1.8bn into the red for the first nine months of this year, has written down €4bn in the value of loans to customers and will need to raise €2.7bn in a bid to shore up its balance sheet.

“With hindsight, it is clear that the bank’s growth ambitions in previous years had been framed against an overly optimistic view of the outlook for the Irish economy and it was too exposed to the property sector and too reliant on wholesale funding,” said Richie Boucher, chief executive of the bank.

In normal circumstances, the need to generate a €2.7bn capital buffer wouldn’t be cause for celebration. However, relatively speaking, BoI is in good shape – Anglo Irish Bank could need another €18.3bn in fresh capital, while AIB will have to raise €7.4bn by the end of 2010.

This might explain why, after a bruising week, its share price has jumped by nearly 30% this morning.

Here’s a breakdown of staff numbers at BoI: