The news that Bank of Ireland intends to cut 750 jobs will not be welcomed by the country’s already beleaguered financial sector.

But when you consider the size of its workforce (14,636 as at December 2009), the fact that the job cuts will be voluntary and that it’s recruiting elsewhere in the business, perhaps the headline figure doesn’t seem as deep a cut as it potentially could have been.

Details of where the redundancies will occur are not forthcoming from BoI, which issued a statement on the job cuts today, along with the assertion that salaries will not be reviewed until April 2011 at the earliest.

It’s just received the green light for its restructuring plan from the EU – which will involve the sale of its asset management arm, its mortgage brokering business New Ireland Assurance Company, ICS Building Society as well as cutting down in its UK corporate banking division.

So, obviously some of the redundancies are likely to hit the UK corporate business and it seems likely that other jobs will be lost in the support functions of businesses that are sold. Retail operations are also a target.

Support functions seem a certain target – BoI transferred over 2,000 staff from retail Republic of Ireland division into its group manufacturing arm in 2009 in a bid to avoid redundancies.

Bank of Ireland has also been recruiting, however. With the governmental pressure to increase lending to SMEs in the Republic, it’s been bolstering its business banking team. There’s also the ongoing contract recruitment around the administration of loans transferring to Nama.

The job cuts will be spread across the UK, Northern Ireland and the Republic over the course of two years and will be deployed on a voluntary basis.

Larry Broderick, general secretary of the IBOA, reiterated the point that staff at Bank of Ireland were being asked to pay a high price for the mismanagement of the institution through substantial job losses.