Officials from the Central Bank have warned that mortgage arrears are “too high in Ireland.”
Speaking before the Oireachtas finance committee on Wednesday to discuss the role of non-bank entities in the Irish housing market and their impact on residential mortgages, staff from the regulator said it was “very clear” there was an issue, with 13,000 mortgage holders here now failing to keep up with their payments.
Deputy Governor, Colm Kincaid said: “There are too many households still in mortgage arrears, and it is taking them too long to resolve those things so that’s really what we’re focused upon.
“Our primary concern is that we continue to make progress in the mortgage arrears that are there [because] we still have too many mortgage arrears in the system,” he added.
Domhnall Cullinan, the Central Bank’s director of banking and payments, said there are “still 13,000 accounts in arrears with the banks, and 5,000 of those in arrears for greater than 90 days, so it’s an ill wind I suppose but they have built up an awful lot of muscle memory in terms of how to deal with non-performing loans over the last 16 years.
“That’s the truth of it. And I don’t think that’s going to have gone away. So I think they will be much more capable of stepping into this space now than they were 16 years ago,” said Mr Cullinan.
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