Euro Zone finance ministers meeting in Luxembourg on Monday were due to discuss progress made by the bloc’s bailout recipients — after Ireland announced that it planned to exit its programme this year — as well as steps towards banking union.

Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny said Saturday that his country would fully resume borrowing on the financial markets from December 15 after receiving a 67.5-billion-euro (91.5-billion-dollar) bailout from the European Union and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in 2010.

“It won’t mean that our financial troubles are over, ... but at last, the era of the bailout will be no more,” he told members of his Fine Gael party, according to the broadcaster RTE. “The economic emergency will be over.” Portugal, Greece and Cyprus are also under international bailouts while Spain’s banking sector is on a support programme, which is due to end this year.

No follow-on assistance was deemed necessary for Spain after the current programme runs out at the end of December, an EU official said on the condition of anonymity, adding that he felt “fairly upbeat” about the country’s economy and banking system.

The 17 ministers of the so-called Eurogroup were also due to discuss progress towards the banking union, the first step of which is to come into place with the establishment of a single bank supervisor next year, under the auspices of the European Central Bank.

This is to be preceded by banking asset reviews and stress tests to give a clear idea of banks’ balance sheets before the supervisor begins work. But questions have been raised about the financing of those banks that are found to hold insufficient capital.

EU Economy Commissioner, Olli Rehn, assured member states in a letter last week that, under current EU rules, they would not be penalised if bank recapitalisations pushed them over their deficit targets.

“Public capital injections are, in general terms, regarded as one-off or temporary measures and as relevant factors for financial stability, which means that they do not count against the member state in the context of the external deficit procedure,” Rehn wrote.

The next step towards banking union is the establishment of a single resolution mechanism, but hurdles remain, with Germany opposing a European Commission proposal that would grant the EU’s executive the final say on winding down failing banks.

Klaus Regling, the head of the eurozone’s bailout fund, has expressed scepticism about it taking on responsibility for failing lenders.

“We have no particular interest in taking over the bank resolution mechanism in the coming years,” he told the German news magazine Der Spiegel . “That is a completely different business to what we are doing now. There are no synergy effects.”

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