The Ryan Review

PTSB’s proposed flogging of 14,000 non-performing loans has caused a furore. Ulster Bank is following suit, under instruction from regulators while AIB’s stance was curious (especially since there are no owner-occupied dwellings in its latest offer), as it deliberately restricted its own sale by insisting on regulated fund buyers.

All sales (and similar) will go ahead, and probably won’t bring down the Government, despite Fianna Fáil’s penchant for throwing all the toys out of the pram before meekly putting them all back in again.

There is a little duplicity at play though. Taoiseach Leo Varadkar pronounced in the Dáil that the funds buying up the distressed books are (mostly) “regulated”, and that only courts can issue possession orders anyway, but the silent point is that regulation itself doesn’t mean a thing.

Possession orders are like hen’s teeth, with courts loathe to hand them out, but where they have, often the mainstream banks never action them, preferring to leave things lie, for political, PR or internal book reasons. So already there are thousands of families still living in the properties that have been legally, but not physically, repossessed by banks who fear an eviction-backlash.

Vulture funds have absolutely no such qualms. So, although they will abide fully by the process and the law, chucking people out of their homes won’t give them a second thought. A repo is a repo after all. That’s why the moral commentators are in high dudgeon. There is no logical alternative to these sales which provide the immediate relief on loan books that banks and regulators need, despite the Twitter solutions being bandied about. No, the State cannot just buy them. No, the individual owners cannot just buy them and mortgage-to-rent scheme is flailing. If there is a real alternative, it’s up to the Government to want to find it.