The mortgage or food ?

Perhaps it is not the second Irish Famine but nevertheless it does not make for good reading. Families in modern Ireland are going without food to meet the demand of mortgage debt. The arrival of the second wave of the economic crisis, giving rise for the first time in many decades to the spectre of hunger, has caused shock across the country writes The Independent .

The fear of losing their home is causing many anguished families to go without enough to eat in order to ensure that they have sufficient money to pay their mortgage. The case highlighted last week of a family in Co Kerry which feels obliged to "cope with a new torment -- hunger" to service a mortgage of €80,000 has caused widespread shock. In a letter to the Irish Times an unemployed man from Tralee, wrote of the "anxiety and pain" the economic crisis had wreaked on his family. The letter writer, who has chosen to use his dole payment to meet a €780 monthly repayment, told of how he had nothing to feed his children except bread and cereal.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that circumstances such as his are now prevalent. There are currently up to 60,000 mortgage holders in the country who are more than three months in arrears on their mortgages.