What you need to know
- The Courts Service Annual Report 2025 notes slight increases in the level of creditor litigation and enforcement activity in the Irish Courts.
- Default judgments obtained by creditors rose by 21% year-on-year, though many of the extra judgments are at District Court level.
- Repossession proceedings by lenders also rose in 2025.
- Corporate and personal insolvency numbers remained flat, staying at their lowest levels in many years. This is notable given ongoing cost and payment pressures on businesses, and reflects the continued resilience of the Irish economy in 2025.
- Early action on distressed debt yields the best dividends for creditors.
Courts Service Annual Report 2025
The recently published Courts Service Annual Report 2025 offers a comprehensive overview of litigation activity across Ireland for the previous calendar year. The Report noted that new civil matters increased by 2% year-on-year to 187,639. The wider backdrop is, of course, the performance of the Irish economy in 2025, which performed strongly despite the prevalence of considerable global economic volatility, intense uncertainty and higher costs.
Debt collection litigation numbers
The Report provides useful insight into how creditors utilised litigation and enforcement mechanisms in the Irish Courts in 2025. Figures for default judgments have told a familiar story about the Irish economy over the past two decades, and the 2025 figures show no major changes in that regard. Indeed, the Report notes that there was an overall 4% decline in what it describes as “actions to recover debt” that the Courts issued.
Since the Covid-19 pandemic, annual default judgments had stabilised at around 8,000. However, 2025 saw a 21% increase, the largest in many years, with 10,014 judgments obtained. The vast majority of this increase (1,515 judgments) occurred in the District Court, where claims are capped at €15,000, reflecting conservative credit limits applied by businesses and lenders in recent years.
