Abandoning It All to Escape a Mortgage
I’ve mentioned a couple of times about young people emigrating out of Ireland like it was in the 1980s and that the recession is taking its toll on many. However, a recent article from Canada’s The Globe and Mail highlighted some other reasons why people would leave the country: to escape their mortgage. Currently in Ireland, if you are unable to keep up payments on your mortgage, you cannot declare bankruptcy to escape the debt. Even if you give the house back to the lender, and even if they sell it to recover some of the money, the lendee is still responsible for every penny of debt they originally owed to the bank.
From the article: “The new emigrants are either young and unemployed…or they are older skilled workers with houses and established lives, who are abandoning it all in bankruptcy.
That describes electrician Gavin O’Brien, who left for Toronto this spring, abandoning his family house. In the peak of the boom, earning perhaps €150,000 a year in the overheated home-construction trade, he raised his mortgage payments to €3,000 a month in hopes of paying off the house within a few years: When the construction industry collapsed completely in 2008, the mortgage company refused to lower his payments. He offered to pay them €1,000 a month or to let them take the house, then got on a plane.
That has become the Irish choice: When your house is worth half the value of your mortgage and your salary is half what it was in 2007, often the best option is simply to leave. Police frequently collect abandoned cars in the parking lot outside Dublin airport.”
What this means is that if they return to Ireland in the future to live, they will still be held accountable to all of their prior debts. And don’t forget that there’s still a Debtors Prison here. Not good.
Mission Team Coming
The new flooring for our kitchen renovation.
In less than four weeks a team from Ocean View Church (our stateside home church which was formerly known as Midway Baptist San Diego) will be sending a team of six. Three of them will be meeting with other churches and sharing about an addiction recovery program, while the other three will be helping to with some work around the church grounds, including a renovation of our church kitchen. They’ll also be taking part in our Sunday services and getting to know the congregation better. We are excited about their visit and looking forward to spending time with them.
Monthly Evening Service
We’d appreciate your prayers for our next monthly evening service which will be this Sunday. It is hard to believe that we began these services last November, and while some in the church weren’t sure what to expect, we have had great feedback and consistently get visitors that are not part of our existing morning service.
Last month we began a new series, looking at “What is the Gospel?” I’m looking forward to continuing it and pray that many of those we are inviting will be able to attend. Alisha and I have met so many over the last few months that have been asking us questions and are very curious about the church. We are using the evening service as an opportunity to invite them to something that is casual and being only monthly, doesn’t intimidate someone who is currently not attending any church.
Please remember us in your prayers as we continue our preparation and for those that we are inviting as well.
Church in Ireland is Changing
A good friend alerted us to this article in the Sunday Business Post, entitled on their front page, “God is Their Business.” The subtext doesn’t show in the online article, but in the print version it read: “A new church inspired by American evangelism may hold clues for how Catholicism could reinvigorate itself as a 21st-century religion.” The article is pretty long, but detailed in its account a church planted by an American in Dublin 22 years ago with 8-10 people meeting in a home—and is now in its own building that seats 1,000.
An important thing to note is that most religious practice in Ireland, whether Catholic or Protestant, would be called “conservative” or “traditional” compared to what many in the States attend. Worship and service styles that we Americans would call modern, contemporary, emergent, relevant, etc. haven’t been seen much over here, so this is a very, very new concept.
The other important thing to realize is that it took a church plant in Ireland 22 years to grow to that size, and it’s situated in the largest city in the Republic. Considering most missionaries leave before completing 18 months, it’s quite a testimony to the leaders of the plant to have such resilience.
Lately Around Ireland
- Property tax may be re-introduced in Ireland in the December budget (currently when you purchase a home you pay a one-time tax)
- Ireland spends over 64% more than other European countries in usage of their cell phones
- Princess Mako of Japan will be attending school at University College Dublin this summer; she is part of the world’s oldest hereditary monarchy
- A 300 pound bomb was found in an abandoned van outside a police station in County Tyrone in the North; thankfully, no one was hurt
- Plans for Galway’s first mosque are underway and will be led by Ireland’s first Irishman to qualify as an Imam; there are an estimated 3,000 Muslims in Galway (the city and surrounding areas hold over 72,000 people as of 2006)
- Found in Armenia, the world’s oldest shoe (estimated to be 5,500 years old) was found under the floor of a cave by a team led by an Irish academic
- A new highway near the Hill of Tara has been accused of creating “a lot of negative energy” according to local self-described pagans
- Athlone, Co. Westmeath is vying to be the “Chinese hub” of industry in Europe, with a possible 10,000 jobs created; meanwhile, the number of Irish people with over €1 million to spend (that’s $1.29 million) actually increased this year by 2,000 people
- They’ve counted frogs, now they’re counting bats: a study of the long-eared Irish bat will cost €60,000. So far they’ve found that they spend most of their time in belfries and favor Church of Ireland buildings over Catholic churches (probably due to the architecture), earning them the nickname “Protestant Bats”
Ireland Weather
