A MAN who lost his family home at the High Court yesterday asked the judge for enough time to let the school term finish before repossession was executed.
Start Mortgages Ltd applied for an order for possession after the family from Trim, Co Meath, fell behind with their mortgage repayments.
The borrowers took out a loan of €267,750 in 2008 and began to build up arrears by the end of that year. Counsel for the lender said they owed back payments of more than €47,500. They had been making payments of €300 a month toward their debt, but that had ceased in May last year and no further payments had been made.
The borrower told Ms Justice Elizabeth Dunne he had a meeting with Start Mortgages and agreed to pay €300 a month, “then after a couple of weeks” he started to get phone calls from the lender telling him he had to increase his repayments. “It was impossible,” he said.
He had hoped that money he was owed from an investment in Nigeria would come through, but that hadn’t happened. “I’d sincerely appreciate enough time for the school year to run out,” he said. Granting the order for possession, Ms Justice Dunne said bearing in mind there were school-going children, she would give a stay of execution of eight months.
She told the man the order did not mean he could not continue to negotiate with the lender and perhaps come to some arrangement that would save his home.
In a separate case, Start Mortgages applied to renew an order to remove a borrower from her home. A possession order had been granted for the home in March 2009, but the lender had afterwards agreed to an arrangement with the borrower to repay €600 a month, €1,400 short of the full repayment. The arrangement continued for a year and a half, then the lender decided the home should be repossessed.
Counsel for the borrower said there was an “inherent injustice” in the lender agreeing to an arrangement for 18 months and then seeking to renew the order. But counsel for the lender said the arrears had tripled since the order was granted to €75,000.
Ms Justice Dunne said leeway had been given to the borrowers to get back on their feet, but the lender was “not obliged to wait forever and a day”. She renewed the order, but refused to grant costs to the lender. The borrower had “genuinely made efforts”, she said.
