Mmmm. Gosh, you Pollyannas are big into your personal attacks and insults. Its too bad that you don't bother your ar*es to check out how deep the rabbithole goes. Just take the mainstream media report as it is.
If you went and checked the actual CSO report as per OP you might have spotted what I was on about. This is link. Please go to page 34.
http://www.cso.ie/releasespublicatio...rrent/silc.pdf
You will see that the vast majority of arrears are related to the financial institutes. Yes I was aware of utility bills, rent and other non financial bills being are included in that 20% grand total. But the vast majority of those bills are under 570 Euro and are paid monthly / bimonthly. Therefore the principal or capital behind them is the amount itself.
But people who may be behind by the same amount of a mortgage repayment may have 300,000 Euro of principal running behind it. Term loans, overdrafts and credit cards may have huge amounts too.
So it is safe to say that the percentage level owing to Banks out of all the complete balance that are in arrears is over 90%.
The number of items that are in arrears stands at 20.3%. Taking a conservative estimate of 90% of the total value of all the loans that are in arrears being financial house related, thats 18.27%.
Thats still massive.
PS - Look before leap, will you?