ABOUT 30 people staged a protest outside a house for sale in Drimnagh in Dublin last night, covering the “For Sale” sign with another reading “Repossessed house – Buyer Beware – No Evictions”.
Robert Marsh had taken over his family home in 2002, taking on the mortgage from his parents. He said later he took out a mortgage from Start Mortgages for €350,000, having consulted a financial broker in 2007.
“He sold it to me,” the 37 year old said yesterday. “I went in to just seek some advice to see if I could engage with my lenders. I came out with a [new] mortgage. I got told that this mortgage company were brilliant at dealing with it, that they were new on the market, that they’d consolidate all my debts and they’d look after me.” Mr Marsh said he immediately found he was struggling to repay the money. “I took the money. Okay, I took it, and I take responsibility for taking it, but I never should have got it, not earning €27,000 a year. It was irresponsible lending.”
Now unemployed, he said at the end of January he asked that the loan be reduced to €235,000, the value of the house at that time, but was refused. The house is for sale with an asking price of €169,000.
Mr Marsh claimed that two days after the January meeting, he received a letter saying the family had a month to leave the property, but that 10 days later the sheriff came to repossess the house.
His wife Anna said the situation had caused a lot of stress for the couple and their daughter Alex: “Everybody would prefer a secure home with a small child, especially moving out of the house with a one-year-old baby in hand. It’s very hard.”
People Before Profit TD Joan Collins, who attended the protest, said this was a wider problem, adding the demonstration was the beginning of a wider campaign aiming to stop people being evicted from their homes.
A spokesman for Start Mortgages said it could not comment on individual cases but said it “makes every attempt to facilitate customers who find themselves in difficulty in order to establish a satisfactory arrangement regarding their arrears”.
“Repossession is and always will be the last resort for Start. We generally agree satisfactory arrangements with the majority of arrears customers without recourse to repossession. In the small number of cases that result in repossession, customers will typically not have met their mortgage repayments in the previous three- to four-year period.”