Irish Fighting Bankers Show It’s Not Just Greeks Protesting Debt

by Dara Doyle

(Bloomberg) -- Byron Jenkins says he would rather destroy his home than hand it over to the banks.
The former builder owes about 750,000 euros ($860,000) on his house in a Co. Kildare town about 40 miles west of Dublin. After 15 court appearances, he’s still fending off repossession.
“All they’ll get back is a pile of bricks,” Jenkins said. “I’ve told them that.”

Banks lodged 10,000 applications to foreclose on family homes in the year through September, a legal rights group said last month, four times as many as in the previous year. The legacy of western Europe’s worst real estate crash is entering a new phase, bringing with it a very Irish version of the backlash against the establishment sweeping Europe.
As Greeks turned to Alexis Tsipras to reverse five years of austerity, and anti-immigrant parties gain ground in countries like France and Sweden, in Ireland, homeowners are increasingly organizing resistance.
Jenkins is part of a group of activists allied to the Land League, named after a 19th century organization that battled with landlords when Ireland was ruled from London. In the 21st century, the fight is against bankers.
“We have been creating mayhem, if by mayhem you
mean keeping people in their homes,” said Jerry Beades, a developer who has spent almost a decade in disputes with banks and financial regulators and is now leading the League. “We are reflecting the anger that’s out there about the level of debt that just can’t be serviced.”

Growing Threat

About 117,000 home-mortgage accounts are in arrears, according to central bank figures, and the Free Legal Advice Centres group said last month that a “substantial spike” in repossessions may be on the way.
With an election due next year, the issue is starting to gain political traction, with Prime Minister Enda Kenny this week urging bankers to do more to address arrears. Homeowners who are behind in their repayments for over two years amount to about a third of all accounts in arrears.
Resistance was evident on a snow-dusted January morning, as a group of anti-repossession campaigners sat around a blazing fire in a small house on the outskirts of Kells, a town 30 miles northeast of Dublin.
Over 72 hours, about 60 people helped to ward off the threat of repossession of the property, home to a couple with a 10-year-old daughter, according to a bearded man who came to the door to discuss the action. He declined to identify himself.

Speedy Response

Days later and about 25 miles away, the Land League hosted a meeting to start up in the northeast of the country as it scrambles groups of activists to homes under threat.
“There’s an alert system: You send a text, and 50 of our people show up,” Beades said. “Our slogan is that we’ll be there faster than an ambulance.”
The Land League’s name has historical resonance in Ireland. In the late-1800s, the organization sought to stop small farmers being evicted in stand-offs that often turned violent, and later helped fuel the movement for independence from Britain.
Ireland won that autonomy in 1922 and its history has been defined by the struggle for land.
“Irish culture is opposed to evictions and repossessions for good historical reasons, and that will not change,” said Brian Lucey, a finance professor at Trinity College Dublin. “Culture will always trump strategy.”

Exposing Industry

The League is one of a loosely-aligned group of organizations aiming to halt evictions. Bryon Jenkins operates the Hub, close to the city’s fruit market, in a space provided by Beades, according to the former builder.
The 55-year old, who took out his home loan with General Electric Co. before it sold its Irish mortgage business in 2012, set up the organization to offer guidance to people in financial distress. The group is also critical of the industry that has grown up around the mortgage crisis.
“Let people know how these guys are making their money,” said Mattie McGrath, an independent member of the Irish parliament involved with the Land League. “It’s an underbelly that shouldn’t be tolerated in a modern democracy. Let them beware that they’ll be exposed. We’d be usurping the name of the Land League if we didn’t stand up and defend our people.”
Days before Christmas, police and security guards stopped about 60 Land League activists from reaching the home of an accountant in an affluent south Dublin suburb. The group wanted to present the man, who it said worked for banks, with a wreath commemorating the suicides of people weighed down by debt.

Hedge Funds

Dublin-based security firm KTech also took legal action against activists who visited the home of a director to hand over a wreath because they said the company was involved in evictions. KTech declined to comment.
Activists also disrupted real estate auctions, prompting some auctioneers to agree not to sell real estate that was the subject of a dispute between banks and borrowers. Beades said his next target may be the hedge funds and private-equity firms that snapped up Irish mortgages after the crash.
Investors such as Apollo Global Management LLC, Lone Star Funds and Oaktree Capital Group LLC have bought mainly non-performing Irish loans in the past months.
“From what we hear, they have a problem,” Beades said. “They can’t get sheriffs to repossess properties and they can’t get auctioneers to sell them. If we can’t reach agreement, then we intend to take on these hedge funds. We’ll visit their offices, we’ll stop repossessions.”