This article is from page 33 of the 2008-07-22 edition of The Clare People. OCR mistakes are to be expected so download the original SWF or the rendered page 33 JPG
CLARE has gone from being one of the counties least strangled by debt to being the county with the highest average debt.
That’s happened in just five years according to a recently published re- port by Business Pro, a Dublin com- pany which records court actions taken by people chasing up unpaid debts. The massive surge does not take account of mortgage debts.
The report found that in 2003, the
average debt to land a Clare person in court was €6,159.
This has rocketed in 2008 to €20,596 – a jump of 234 per cent. The debts which find their way into the report include unpaid personal loans, utility and tax bills.
Five years ago, just two counties had average debts of €10,000. That number has risen to seven today, with Clare topping the league followed by Kilkenny, Dublin, Galway, Kildare, Monaghan and Roscommon.
The Clare indebtedness figures are
against a national average of €8,900, the figure for which debtors are tak- en to court having failed to pay their bills or repay loans.
“There has been so much easily available and cheap credit in Ireland over the last five years that a lot more people have been borrowing money,” said James Treacy, managing direc- tor of Business Pro.
‘A certain percentage of those loans will always go bad. That is one of the reason debt will go up over the next 12 months.”