For several years letters of demand and court papers landed at Donal’s door seeking the repayment of millions of euro on loans advanced for his Celtic Tiger property investments. The property crash destroyed the value of some 50 buy-to-let rental properties the Corkman bought in the southwest, leaving him nursing large debts he could never repay.
In 2018 the 40-something businessman (who did not want to give his real name) decided to tackle his debts head on. He agreed a personal insolvency arrangement (PIA) with creditors that allowed him to walk away from €7.7 million in debts to several banks and retain his home.
Unlike the private debt deal secured with AIB by Kilkenny hurler DJ Carey, this settlement was carried out through the formal PIA process.
After all his investment properties were sold off, Donal’s creditors accepted a lump sum of €75,000 raised by his family in a full and final settlement of his remaining debts. Those creditors included AIB which wrote off €3.7 million for a €36,000 share of that lump sum.
[ AIB says ‘no special deals for special individuals’ on debt write-offsOpens in new window ]
For AIB, the settlement amounted to a debt write-off of 99 per cent in a PIA devised by the Dungarvan-based personal insolvency practitioner Mitchell O’Brien.
Donal is one of about 4,300 unnamed borrowers referred to by the majority State-owned bank to the Oireachtas finance committee on Thursday who had debts written off in PIAs.
“Don’t tell me I got an easy ride; I went through torture for four or five years. Anyone who thinks you walk away unscathed is wrong. The turbulence before it is frightening,” he said. “The deal comes at a huge cost; you lose your pension, you are stripped of more or less of everything. I was left with my house, which you get to keep in a PIA.”
[ AIB agreed 1,900 deals where 90% of debt written-off after financial crashOpens in new window ]
The alternative was bankruptcy. Donal had threatened to go bankrupt in the UK during his protracted interactions with his banks and vulture funds that bought some of his loans. “If I had gone bankrupt they would have got jack-s**t,” he said.
He accepts that borrowers struggling to make ends meet to repay a smaller mortgage to a single bank can be worse off than big borrowers unable to repay millions to several. “The more you owe the bank, the more they worry and the better the deal you get,” he said.
Donal defends a system that allows people to shed unsustainable debt and start again. “It’s the way the system works. What do we want? Do you put us all on Inishvickillane with the gulls or do you let us back in the game?” he said, referring to one of the Blasket Islands off the Co Kerry coast.
He has since started a new business.
“It [the debt deal] gave me back control of my life again,” he said. “As soon as you got through it, the debt collection letters stopped.”
