'Financial treason." That's how Mike Hurrell, one of the founders of the IBRC mortgage holders group, describes plans to imminently sell off thousands of cut-price Irish mortgages on the open market.

I should declare an interest. I'm one of the 13,250 IBRC mortgage holders in the country. Until last week, I had no idea that my mortgage, originally taken out with Irish Nationwide, was about to be sold off at a hugely discounted rate to foreign investors. Suddenly I learn that outside investment companies are to be given the opportunity to buy Irish mortgages at 90 cent in the euro for performing mortgages and, if some reports are true, for as low as 40 cent in the euro for non-performing ones – and an obvious question arises.

If they can be given the chance to do so, why can't individual mortgage holders be offered the opportunity to avail of the same deal? Thousands of mortgage holders are in serious financial difficulty, struggling with arrears and negative equity. If they could buy back their own mortgages at a discount of up to 40 per cent, it could transform their lives. Overnight they would be better able to meet repayments, meaning more family homes would be saved from repossession, all at the exact same cost to the Irish State.

An Irish government, letting its own citizens share the benefits of a smaller mortgage rather than gifting it to international financiers with no interest in this country's long-term welfare: what would be so wrong with that?

Not possible, said Enda Kenny when he was challenged about this in the Dail by independent deputy Stephen Donnelly last week (see below). If mortgage holders were to avail of this deal, the Taoiseach declared, it could lead to challenges from other creditors. Which makes what's happening sound like a principled stance that treats all creditors equally. But it isn't. Large investors are quietly pocketing massive discounts on loan books all the time. Indeed, in the case of IBRC mortgages, the discounts are publicly being touted around as an attractive part of the deal for potential investors.

Someone somewhere is always benefiting from huge discounts. It's just never us. Partly because our debts, whilst onerous enough to ruin some lives and most people's peace of mind, aren't big enough for governments to even notice.

I don't know why being confronted with the fact that these people don't give a rat's ass about us should still be surprising, but it is. What's even more infuriating is that they don't even have the decency, whilst selling out the houses from under our feet, to ensure that those who make huge profits from these portfolios of loans are bound by the code of conduct which the Central Bank has put in place to protect those in mortgage arrears, or to ensure that their customers have the same access to the Financial Ombudsman's office as mortgage holders with other financial institutions.

The Government's position is that it hopes any investors who buy these loans will abide by Irish rules on repossession, but that there's nothing it can do to compel them. Nothing an Irish government can do, in Ireland, to include Irish families as of right under the umbrella of Irish regulation – what a truly despicable attitude. The only reassurance the Government has to offer is that, if problems do arise, it'll do its best to sort them out at the time.

Nobody would buy a garden shed on this basis. "Well, there's a problem with rising damp and subsidence, but, just hand over the money anyway and sure, we'll sort it all out later." But when it's a matter of billions, what would be economic madness on the small scale becomes the "efficient" way, to borrow the Taoiseach's phrase, to do business.

IBRC mortgage holders could be delivered within weeks into the hands of unscrupulous subprime American cowboys who can ratchet up the interest rate on mortgages then foreclose on houses with potential impunity when people, stretched beyond endurance, fall behind in repayments. Whether these people come from Dublin, Milton Keynes, Texas, China or the planet Venus doesn't matter. What rankles is that they're getting the chance to buy our mortgages at a massively sweetened rate whilst we still have to pay full whack on properties we can neither afford nor sell, when we could have been offered the same deal.

IBRC mortgages may be small potatoes in terms of the country's overall loan book, but they're hugely significant for the

individuals and families concerned. Allowing them to avail of these discounts might, literally, be life-changing for many of them, putting them back in control of their own future rather than subsisting day to day as little more than life-support machines for an unsustainable debt. Yet seemingly that doesn't matter at all.

As part of the legislation rushed through the Dail on that extraordinary night last year by deputies, many of whom weren't even sober, it's now written into law that "the common good may require permanent or temporary interference with the rights, including property rights, of persons".

Now those chickens are coming home to roost, and those who bailed out the banks are being made to take a further hit whilst international financial institutions pocket the profits. The Fine Gael/ Labour Government clearly feels confident that it can get away with it, because IBRC mortgage holders are a disparate, disunited group of people who feel powerless in the face of their problems and, as such, can neither woo nor frighten ministers in the same way as "big swinging mickey" money men.

The Government is even trying to fob off people by saying that it would be too complex and cumbersome to go through each individual mortgage and offer deals on a case-by-case basis, when, as Mike Hurrell pointed out to me last week, these mortgages have already been assessed and grouped into appropriate bundles as part of the coming sell-off.

Government ministers are old hands at stonewalling, but it still might not be too late to do something. Originally the sale was to be completed by the turn of the year. That's now been extended until the end of March. There is still time for individuals to write to their local TD or get campaigning; the IBRC mortgage holders group on Facebook will be glad of any support.

Fianna Fail's Michael McGrath has also published a bill which would ensure that Irish citizens whose mortgages are sold on, through no say or fault of their own, to unregulated third parties from outside the State will be covered by the Central Bank's code of conduct and will be able to seek protection from the Financial Ombudsman if it all goes wrong.

Put simply, the Government shouldn't be allowed to get away with this. Centuries ago, foreign invaders at least had to come here before they could start shipping Irish citizens off as slaves to offshore colonies. Now it's governments of an independent Irish state who are symbolically doing the same to their own people. The human cost is 13,500 mortgage holders who couldn't sleep with worry last week and may be facing more sleepless nights in the months and years to come as they find themselves abandoned as financial refugees in their own country. Treason isn't the half of it.

Sunday Independent