Dick Roche (Wicklow, Fianna Fail)

-----with figures from the UK Council of Mortgage lenders indicates that UK repossession rates per 100,000 mortgages are 30 times those in Ireland. Media reports of repossession cases taken through the courts show that most involve sub-prime lenders, as mentioned by the Deputy, which made mortgages available to borrowers who would not have been customers of the mainstream lenders, often because of perceived higher risks. Cases in which borrowers stopped payment after a few months, failed to respond to repeated attempts to contact them or even abandoned their houses feature regularly in media reports of repossession cases before the courts.

Suggestions that thousands of ordinary families are at risk of being evicted are far from the truth. They are unnecessarily frightening for those who find themselves in difficulty and should not be made.

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