Accountant’s voluntary service to aid families burned by property crash

Date Published: 16-Mar-2011

A GALWAY accountant has committed himself to setting up a voluntary association called PAMA aimed at helping ‘ordinary people’ who have been badly burnt in Ireland’s economic crash after either re-mortgaging or taking out loans to buy second properties.

The move comes in the week of a harrowing repossession case in Dublin’s High Court on Monday, involving a Ballinasloe farmer unable to pay back a €100,000 mortgage on his home.

The 61-year-old owed arrears of €20,000 on the house to Start Mortgages and was on €147 a week in farm assistance – he told the Court that he was trying to sell the house with surrounding land, that had been valued at €1 million in ‘the good times’.

He wanted to put together whatever money he could, to care for his 29-year-old son, who was in need of medical attention.

Start Mortgages were granted the re-possession order but Ms. Justice Elizabeth Dunne allowed a twelve month stay of execution on the order to give the man a chance to sell his house and farm.

This week, Monivea man, Michael F. Dolan – a candidate in the recent General Election – said that many ordinary individuals and families who had decided to invest in a second property over the past decade, now found themselves completely ‘over-stretched’.

PAMA (the People’s Asset Management Association), he said, would initially provide a network of contacts and advice guidelines for individuals in the Galway area, who now found themselves in a perilous financial situation with the banks and financial institutions about to ‘close in on them’.

See full story in this week’s Connacht Tribune.