Market fears over the solvency of Ireland’s troubled banks and the potential threat they pose to both government finances and to the country’s growth prospects may yet bring contagion to other peripheral European markets, investors fear.

Ireland is one of the countries included in the PIIGS bracket, an acronym for the peripheral economies of Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain, which are generally viewed as having the most threatening debt problems of any countries in the Eurozone.

Some