Irish Lawyers Battle Bankers for Mortgage Escape as GE Eyes Exit
By Finbarr Flynn - May 27, 2012 7:01 PM ET
As Ireland’s mortgage crisis worsens, attorney Ross Maguire just gets busier.
Maguire, 43, leads a group of about 50 lawyers working for free on behalf of homeowners fighting repossessions after the worst housing-market collapse in western Europe. The nation’s central bank estimated last week that one in 10 Irish home loans is in arrears, and Prime Minister Enda Kenny said they represented the single biggest concern for the country’s people.
“We started out thinking about this in a humanitarian manner,” Maguire said in an interview at his office close to Dublin’s main courts complex on the banks of the River Liffey. “But the more we looked at it, the more we discovered the scandal of what had gone on. People were granted mortgages where there was no mathematical possibility they could repay.”
The bursting of the real estate bubble in 2008 put Ireland at the vanguard of the European debt crisis that’s still raging more than three years later. While the government has been trying to show investors the country isn’t like Greece, escalating mortgage woes are hampering Ireland’s prospects of escaping the worst recession in its modern history.
Deputy Central Bank Governor Matthew Elderfield told reporters in Dublin on May 21 that “overwhelmed” lenders aren’t sufficiently prepared to deal with struggling homeowners, and urged banks to move quicker to deal with bad loans.
“Losses have to be borne and trying to avoid them by not doing restructuring for zombie households will leave the economy languishing,” Michael Saunders, head of European economics at Citigroup Inc. in London, said in an interview. “Mortgage debt is a very serious problem.”
much more:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-05-27/irish-lawyers-battle-bankers-for-mortgage-escape-as-ge-eyes-exit.html
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