Pamela Flood and husband to lose home over €1.2m debt to bank

Former Miss Ireland Pamela Flood and her restaurateur husband Ronan Ryan have been told they can walk away from the €1.2 million debt they owe against the Dublin home they have lived in for free for the past nine years.

Judge Jacqueline Linnane was also told in the Circuit Civil Court on Friday the couple who have four children, will not have to pay the legal bill two banks have incurred in trying to re-possess their family home at Mount Prospect Avenue, in leafy Clontarf, Dublin 3.

The couple’s barrister Eoin O’Shea told the court that Mr Ryan and his wife, a former TV presenter, had given the US-owned Tanager bank an undertaking they and their children will have vacated the property by July 9th.

In return, the bank would undertake to limit the couple’s indebtedness to whatever it could recover from the sale of the property — no legal costs, no repayment of €374,000 arrears they had built up since 2010 and no liability for the €1.25 million outstanding on the mortgage.

Rudi Neuman, counsel for Tanager Dac, told Judge Linnane that Ms Flood and Mr Ryan, who had taken out a €1.1 million mortgage with Bank of Scotland just before Christmas 2006, had consented to the court granting Tanager an order for possession against them.

Mr Neuman, who appeared with Amoss Solicitors, told the court the bank had agreed to a stay on the execution of the order for four months on condition the couple delivered up vacant possession of the house, worth up to €800,000, along with “all keys, fobs, electronic access devices and alarm codes” and an undertaking to co-operate with an auctioneer to show off the property.

He said the bank sought an order restraining the couple from damaging the house or removing any fixtures and fittings and subject to their full compliance with the terms of the settlement document their indebtedness would be limited to the sum recovered from the sale.

Unsustainable

The bank was also not seeking any order for costs against the couple.

Mr O’Shea told Judge Linnane the terms of the settlement agreement had been explained carefully to his clients, who had put forward the vacant possession proposal that had been accepted by the bank.

Judge Linnane, who heard that any other suggested arrangement would now be wholly unsustainable, said it was a pity such a settlement agreement could not have been reached much earlier in the proceedings. She made court orders in the terms of the proposed settlement.

The court heard earlier Mr Ryan (48) had not paid anything off his €1.1 million mortgage since August 2010. His 47-year-old wife had not been named on the 2006 mortgage documents with Bank of Scotland but had been joined as a Notice Party to the proceedings following her marriage to Mr Ryan in 2014.

Tanager, described as an American-owned vulture fund, has a registered office at Clanwilliam Square, Grand Canal Quay, Dublin. It acquired more than 2,000 distressed Irish home loans from Bank of Scotland almost 10 years ago. More than 90 per cent of those loans were two years or more in arrears.

Under the agreement the couple, after a period of two weeks following today’s court case, will facilitate house sales representatives access to their home for the purpose of photographing and assessing the property for inclusion in sales brochures.