IRELAND is in payback mode at the moment. As a country we’re experiencing “deleveraging”, which means that many people are using most of their money to pay back excessive borrowing. However, that practice only puts cash into the banking system and not the real economy.
This is because banks aren’t lending — they’re too busy using the cash to put out fires within their own institutions. There are 786,000 Irish households with a mortgage, and six per cent of them are in trouble. The vast majority of that six per cent haven’t paid the bank a single cent in more than six months.
SOLUTION
Our Government-led solution is to encourage that to continue. They’ve made it almost impossible for banks to repossess homes — Labour’s solution of a two-year moratorium on repossessions reeks of “delay and pray”. A further 24,000 mortgages have been restructured and are still not performing, while 35,000 are only staying afloat due to a change in their conditions — mainly by not paying back the loan, only servicing the …