‘It was fantastic to know there could be light at end of tunnel’

“People think that when you’re in mortgage difficulties it must be your own fault, that you must have somehow brought it all on yourself,” says Mary* from her home in the midlands.

She has been fighting to keep that home – one she shares with her four children – for more than 10 years, but it was only with the announcement of the expansion of the mortgage-to-rent scheme by Minister for Housing Simon Coveney earlier this week that she finally felt she might be getting the upper hand in that fight.

When her husband and the father of her four young children grew increasingly abusive in 2005, Mary felt she had no choice but to get a barring order. “He had been violent before then, he had been hitting me for a long time, but that was the year it got much worse. When they were very young I was able to protect them from his violence, or at least I could hide it from them.

“But they were older and able to see it, what he was doing. I have two boys and two girls, so I had to act. If I had done nothing, I would have been showing my little boys that it was okay for men to hit women, and if I had done nothing I would have been telling my girls that they too would just have to accept it.”

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Her husband was ordered by the courts to leave the five-bedroom home they had bought together in 2001. She felt she could keep on top of things – at least financially – as the mortgage was comparatively small. The couple had bought before the property bubble had inflated too much. Then she found letters from their bank that left her reeling.

Secretly remortgaged

“In 2005, and without my knowledge, my husband had remortgaged the house. There was a €365,000 mortgage on it. That has climbed to around €400,000 today. The house is worth just €150,000. I only found out by accident. I wasn’t supposed to find the letters and I still don’t know what he did with the money. I certainly never saw any of it.”

Her husband went for counselling, completed an anger-management course and returned to the family home – until 2007. “The violence got worse and we split for good. He stopped paying the mortgage and closed all our joint accounts. That was when the mortgage lender really went to town on me. I tried to pay what I could, but the were calling me 10 times a week, so there I was, with my marriage breaking down, living with domestic violence and the banks pounding me. It just went on and on.

“I was having suicidal thoughts. I know that is a terrible thing to say, but it is the truth. Your mind goes to terrible places. I was thinking that maybe if I wasn’t here, then maybe the life insurance could cover the mortgage and my children would have somewhere to live.”

She hung on and just over two years ago she was advised to make contact with the Phoenix project – a Portlaoise-based charity that helps people in mortgage distress.

“They started dealing with my lender and suddenly the threats lifted. When I heard the news this week about the mortgage-to-rent being extended, it was a huge deal for me, it was amazing, it was absolutely fantastic to know that there could be some light at the end of the tunnel after 10 years of stress and torment that I endured. Because I chose to protect my children from violence I was punished. We were normal people and we didn’t ask to be in this position.”

She doesn’t have a time frame for the scheme, but the Phoenix project has told her it is confident she will qualify. “They hope it will be within six months; there is a lot of paperwork still to be done, but maybe when it is done life can get back to normal. ”

*Not her real name