Ulster Bank has chopped staff costs by 24%

It's fair to say that RBS employees in Ireland have been particularly badly affected by the bank's ongoing cost-cutting exercise, with 1,000 redundancies hitting its Ulster Bank operations over the last 18 months.

This is starkly illustrated in its Q1 report, which reveals staff costs have shrunk by 24% over the last year. Ulster Bank shelled out 66m (€75.8m) on employees in the first quarter of 2010, compared to 89m over the same period last year.

Over 700 jobs were cut in January 2009, as RBS merged its First Active mortgage brand under the Ulster Bank umbrella, and another 250 redundancies were announced in August.

It's easy to see the need for this cost-cutting. Loan impairments continue to weigh heavy on the bank's profits - it was 81m in the black before impairments, but reported a 137m loss after this was taken into consideration.

This is still a significant improvement on the previous quarter, however, when Ulster Bank posted a 275m loss.

"The Irish property market remains subdued, with continued uncertainty around the impact on property valuations of the Irish Government's National Asset Management Agency," RBS said in its Q1 report published today.

The banking sector may be slightly cheered by Bank of Ireland's latest economic bulletin, which shows that commercial property prices in the country made a marginal positive return in the first quarter of 2010. Still, they remain 56% down on peak prices.