Does the Irish stock market really need another financial share, and can anyone supply the rationale why the merged TSB/ ACC (if the merger ever happens) should float on the stock market. Sometime next year is the target date for the flotation of the State's next publicly-quoted bank, but is there really going to be any appetite for TSB/ACC stock?

Quite frankly, the Irish stock market is stuffed to the gills with financial shares - between them AIB and Bank of Ireland still account for more than 27 per cent of the market despite their shares taking a pummeling over the past nine months.

Add in Irish Life & Permanent's near 5 per cent of the market (and more if it issues a dollop of equity to part-fund a possible acquisition of Ulster Bank), Anglo Irish and First Active, then more than one-third of the Irish market is made up of banking shares.

That represents an unhealthy dominance of the market, and many market-watchers believe that the last thing the ISEQ needs is another small financial share. Given that domestic and overseas fund managers are moving their money into the euro zone, what will be the investment attraction of a bank which will have at most a market value of around £500 million (€635 million)? That puts TSB/ACC firmly in the small cap sector, being actively spurned by institutional investors.

Needless to say, First Active's dismal performance since it floated a year ago has done nothing to improve the prospects of TSB/ACC, even though the merged State banks are far more diverse than the mortgage-dependent First Active.

First Active is the perfect example of why a building society should never have floated in the first place and did so for all the wrong reasons. It didn't need the money and the only beneficiaries have been a management group who have shown themselves incapable of broadening the bank's earnings base. It's only a pity that it took Bank of Scotland's entry into the Irish mortgage market to expose First Active for the over-focused single product entity that it is.

Now First Active is apparently set to take the axe to its branch network in an effort to restore some of the margins lost since Bank of Scotland broke the cosy club in the Irish mortgage market. Current Account has more than a little sympathy for the comments from SIPTU that if there are to be cutbacks, then they should start at the top. If there is fat to be trimmed at the branch level, then there is certainly fat that could be trimmed at the Booterstown head office.