But it is better than having zombie banks haunting a zombie economy.

If you don't do that you are going to have a lot of zombie banks.

Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman calls them zombie banks.

We have nationalised two Irish zombie banks and continue to pump billions of euro into them.

If zombie banks are allowed to fail, ultimately credit flows improve, perhaps both in volume and impact.

We'd get no external help because we'd have given two fingers to the European Central Bank and handed them our zombie banks.

The newspaper claimed the Government was "prolonging the uncertainty in the hope that zombie banks will, Lazarus-like, come back to life".

This was the Japanese approach of the early 1990s and it led to a decade of zombie banks, low growth and deflation, he said.

EU COMMISSIONER Charlie McCreevy has warned that governments risk prolonging the economic crisis unless they tackle " zombie banks" incapable of lending to companies.

Zombie banks are those impaired enough that their energies are used in keeping themselves upright rather than in playing their role within the economy.