DUBLIN--Bank of Ireland PLC (IRE, BIR.DB) plans to sell a three-year, euro-denominated unsecured bond and has appointed four international banks to oversee the transaction, the lender said Tuesday, in a sale that could mark a significant step in its recovery from Ireland's deep banking-debt crisis.

The bank is considered to be the healthiest among a small surviving group of three Irish lenders, including Allied Irish Banks PLC (AIBYY) and Permanent TSB (ILO.DB), that required huge amounts of Irish taxpayers' cash when the country's commercial-property market collapsed five years ago. Ireland was eventually overwhelmed by the costs of saving its banking system, and it was forced to strike an international bailout deal in late 2010.

Shut out for a long period from conventional bank-lending markets, Irish banks have required large amounts of funding from the European Central Bank.

Still 15%-owned by the government, Bank of Ireland sold bonds in November last year that were secured on its Irish home-loans book for the first time since the country's bailout, but the sale of senior unsecured three-year bonds would be its first-such transaction since September 2009.

The Irish government has said it is very confident it will emerge from its bailout when the last of the 67.5 billion euros ($87.3 billion) of emergency loans are disbursed by the European Union and International Monetary Fund at the end of this year.

Bank of Ireland said it has appointed BNP Paribas, Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley and RBS to help sell the three-year bond.

Write to Eamon Quinn at eamon.quinn@dowjones.com

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