One-in-ten mortgages in trouble as crisis rumbles on

PERCHED on a chair overlooking a wood panel-lined room in Dublin’s High Court, a bespectacled Judge Elizabeth Dunne has become all-too-used to hearing from the victims of Ireland’s economic meltdown.

Each Monday, Dunne presides over repossession hearings, with one-in-10 Irish mortgages now in trouble. At the end of last year, more than 79,000 borrowers were behind on payments or had loan terms altered due to “financial distress,” the Central Bank said on February 28.

“Things are getting worse and worse,” said Dunne, as she weighed the case of a couple about €114,000 in arrears on a €558,938 home loan, one of 74 cases on her list on March 7. “Putting off the evil day is not going to help.”