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Fri 11 Nov 2009It's time to revisit the debt penalty
Urgent reform is needed to drag our Victorian personal debt system into the 21st century, writes Caroline Madden
‘A MAN who pays his bills on time is soon forgotten,” Oscar Wilde once said, no doubt to glamorise his own rather relaxed attitude towards settling debts. However, it is those who can’t pay their bills who have been forgotten by modern Irish society. Despite the explosion in consumer credit in recent years, our systems for dealing with personal overindebtedness have not been modernised to reflect this change; they remain more suited to Wilde’s pre-credit society than to 21st-century Ireland.
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