Ronan Ryan and Pamela Flood to sell house after reaching deal with US fund

Couple won High Court appeal against possession order last year

The restauranteur Ronan Ryan and his wife, former Miss Ireland and TV personality, Pamela Flood, are to sell their home in Clontarf, Dublin, under a deal agreed with the US fund Tanager.

In October last, the couple won a High Court appeal against a possession order that had been granted to the fund over the house on Mount Prospect Avenue.

They argued that the fund was not entitled to possession because Mr Ryan had obtained a protective certificate that gave him a period of protection from his creditors as part of his application for a personal insolvency arrangement.

Mr Ryan, a well-known restauranteur, had a mortgage debt on the property. Ms Flood was a notice party to the proceedings.

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The one-time owner of the Town Bar & Grill in Dublin had at one stage consented to a possession order that would see Tanager settle for whatever it could get by selling the property. However Mr Ryan then instituted personal insolvency proceedings.

He was seeking court approval for a personal insolvency deal that would have seen the write-off of approximately half of his debt of €1.6 million, but leaving the couple with their family home, but the fund was to oppose it. The agreement now reached means there will no longer be a need for court proceedings in relation to that.

During the possession proceedings in 2019, it emerged that the couple had not made any mortgage payments on the home for years.There was a lot of outrage expressed at the time on social media, Mr Ryan said in media interviews, but the original assisted sale arrangement he had come to with Bank of Scotland (Ireland) in 2012, did not involve any further mortgage repayments on the house.

The house was then put on the market on a number of occasions, but the bank did not go through with the sales, holding back in the hope of achieving a better price.

The US fund bought more than 2,000 distressed Irish home mortgages from Bank of Scotland (Ireland). Tanager became the owner of the Ryan mortgage in 2014.

The house has now been put on the market with an asking price of €695,000. The couple are running a catering business called Counter Culture and still have debts to Bank of Ireland and Everyday Finance that have been given a value of more than €350,000 in court filings.

Colm Keena

Colm Keena

Colm Keena is an Irish Times journalist. He was previously legal-affairs correspondent and public-affairs correspondent