Ireland should ramp up house possessions, says OECD chief

IRELAND should ramp up house repossessions from people not paying their mortgages or risk another run on the banks and a painful second bailout, the head of the OECD said yesterday,

Speaking in Dublin, secretary general in the intergovernmental economic organisation, Angel Gurria said: ‘When you have a loan that cannot be repaid then the resolution should be as fast as possible from the point of view of the financial system because it eventually will have to be bailed out. You, particularly, know how painful this can be if you do not act in a timely fashion in order to cleanse the balance sheets.’

Ireland went through a three-year €67.5billion joint bailout by the IMF, the EC and the ECB to save the banks and rescue the economy in 2010 after the property market crashed.

Mr Gurria, in Dublin to speak at a conference on international tax policy, said mortgages were ‘no exception’, ‘they are a loan like any other loan’.

But he did say the State should support those in danger of losing homes through the public purse and it should not be through the courts or the banks. He remarked: ‘The social side, there has to be an efficient resolution in between because the courts have to be as expeditious as possible.

‘On the other side, if in some cases, because of the needs or because of social vulnerability of some groups, the State would decide to support some of these groups.’

But struggling homeowners’ campaigner David Hall, of the Irish Mortgage Holders’ Organisation, criticised Mr Gurria’s remarks, stating: ‘They are all institutional supporters, they don’t make a comment about the fact the banks didn’t have any rules or regulations at the time they were giving the loans such as the Central Bank’s lending rules.

‘It’s all one-way traffic with those lads, they ran amok. I don’t hear him giving out about the lads running amok. They lent out too much and too cheaply.’