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High-profile restaurateur Ronan Ryan will sell the family home he shares with his wife, former Miss Ireland Pamela Flood, under a deal signed with a vulture fund.
The deal will eliminate a 1.2 million euro mortgage debt Ryan owes to the Tanager fund and leave the celebrity couple in a position to downsize to a new home.
In an interview with the Irish Independent, the restaurateur said an agreement had been reached that both sides were happy with.
“It is a great burden on our minds,” he said.
A courtroom battle was brewing between the fund and the sole owner of Town Bar & Grill after last year acceded to a Dublin property possession order, only to start a personal insolvency process in the last minute after changing your mind. . Ryan (49) had been seeking court approval for a settlement that canceled 634,000 euros of his 1.6 million euros debts while maintaining the family home.
But the agreement with Tanager means that the matter will no longer continue.
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“I went with the flow”: Pamela Flood with her children at their home on Mount Prospect Avenue in Clontarf, Dublin, last July. Photo: David Conachy
“Everything was friendly. They are happy, we are happy and it is selling,” Ryan said.
Attorney Ross Maguire of debt management firm New Beginning participated in the negotiation of the settlement.
The couple’s home on Mount Prospect Avenue in Clontarf, Dublin, where they live with four children, has now been put on the market with a starting price of € 695,000.
Ryan said he would still have to settle minor debts with other creditors, Bank of Ireland and Everyday Finance. These debts have been included in the court documents as € 270,000 and € 91,000 respectively.
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Ronan Ryan and Pamela Flood’s house in Clontarf
Ryan was a successful restaurateur during the Celtic Tiger years, operating Town Bar & Grill on Kildare Street and Bridge Bar & Grill in Dublin’s Docklands.
In 2008 he met Mrs. Flood (now 48), a former Miss Ireland who hosted a series of television shows for RTÉ, including the fashion magazine show ‘Off The Rails’.
But South Bar & Restaurant, a business that opened in Sandyford, was unsuccessful and struggling financially at the time of the economic collapse. South Bar & Restaurant closed in 2008, while Bridge Bar & Grill retired and Town Bar & Grill entered the exam in 2009.
Soon his lender, the Bank of Scotland (Ireland), was looking for the sale of the family home and in 2012 he signed an “assisted sale” agreement.
However, according to Ryan, several proposed sales failed because the bank thought it might be able to get a better offer.
“It was a financial decision in 2008 that brought me here. It has been a 12-year long drop,” he told the Irish Independent.
“You can see why people went to England and filed for bankruptcy. The short, sharp shock. But we always try to keep the show on track.”
Ryan said there was a “Twitter collapse” when it was learned in court last September that he had not made mortgage payments in seven years.
But he said people had only seen “one side” of the story.
Under the “assisted sale” agreement with the Bank of Scotland, he did not have to make any mortgage repayments.
He said the bank told him that he only wanted the asset and that the payments were irrelevant.
According to Mr. Ryan, the house was on the verge of being sold on several occasions, but was withdrawn since the bank thought it could obtain a better sale price.
“Obviously they made the investment and wanted to get it back,” he said.
“It seemed like we took the ramp out of the sale. But we had nothing to do with it.”
“We never fight once. We go with the flow.”
Tanager bought the loan in 2014 and things returned to a tipping point last year when the fund applied for and was granted a possession order.
But it failed to execute the order after the Superior Court ruled last October that the fund had no right to possession. This was because Mr. Ryan had obtained a certificate of protection as part of his application for a personal insolvency agreement, which gave him a period of protection against creditors.
Although he had originally consented to turn over the property, a court later heard that he did not know that personal insolvency was an option at the time.
The agreement with Tanager means that Mr. Ryan is no longer seeking that option.
The restaurateur first “found out” about the possibility of a Christmas deal.
“It really all fell into place,” he said.
Now that a solution has been agreed, Ryan is eager to move on.
He currently runs a catering company under contract with his wife, called Counter Culture.
While it has been affected by the Covid-19 crisis, things have improved in recent weeks.
“We have a takeaway business that has been run at night,” Ryan said.
“We started just two of us. We now have six employees back. We are working seven days a week from noon to 10.
“Obviously not the full blow, but we have found our little niche.”
Orders are delivered by Uber Eats and Deliveroo.
“We are delighted. It is a small percentage of what was happening before, but it is great to have the staff back,” he said.
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