Eddie Hobbs and cabaret politics

Eddie Hobbes has emerged as not just a television phenomenon but a political one as well. His Rip Off Republic series has done possibly fatal damage to the reputation of this Government.

Eddie Hobbs has emerged not just as a new television personality but as a political phenomenon. He has inflicted perhaps terminal damage on this Government by deploying techniques of cabaret and humour to savage a record of financial mismanagement on a scale the public only now has begun to appreciate.

The facts of financial wastage have been in the public domain for years. Outlined painstakingly by the Comptroller and Auditor General, John Purcell, by the Dáil Committee on Public Accounts, by television and radio programmes and the print media. But the dry data of huge cost overruns made little impact until now. Eddie Hobbs has managed to score point after point on the government's record with an easy Cork humour and clever, rudimentary televisual techniques.

The damage inflicted is not just on the score of wastage of public funds but on the Government's failure to challenge vested interests in a variety of critical areas, from cement to public houses to groceries. Perhaps in this area, he will have inflicted special damage on the Progressive Democrats, whose ideological brief has been to liberalise the economy.

He has also dented the Government's claims to have reduced taxes. While income tax has come down, Hobbs has shown a variety of other taxes, notably VAT, excise duty, stamp duty and other "stealth" taxes have remained.

The impact of the four-part television series has come at a bad time for the Government, since public and private research surveys have shown a decline in its support. These surveys and last year's local election results suggest Fianna Fáil will lose between ten and 15 seats in the next election and the Progressive Democrats could be reduced to three or four seats, from its present level of eight. In such circumstances the present Government could not be returned to office, even with the support of some Independent TDs.

However the Hobbs phenomenon has also exposed weaknesses in the Opposition. All the information available to Hobbs has been at the disposal of the Opposition parties for years and yet they have failed to make an impact. In part this is because of their own culpability for much of the overruns – for instance, LUAS was sanctioned by the Fine Gael-Labour government of John Bruton on the basis of projections that have been found entirely unrealistic (see panel). But it has been also because of a failure to make impact with the public even when such promising material is at its disposal.

Eddie Hobbs himself has no interest in going into politics, he says. He certainly is likely to be head-hunted by Fine Gael or Labour. In fact were he to be tempted to run for a Dáil seat it probably would be for Fianna Fáil, seemingly a genetic disposition.

Rip Off Republic

Rip Off Republic arose from preparatory work done for the other television programme Eddie Hobbs has presented Show me the Money. He found while researching that programme, and in his work as a financial adviser, that more and more people on average wages (up to €60,000) were finding it difficult to make ends meet. In getting people to do budgets on their weekly expenditures, he found after they had paid for essentials – mortgage, child care, food, clothing, schooling – there was little left and they were getting into debt, particularly credit card debt. He deciphered a rising anger and it was into that mood that Rip Off Republic tapped.

Conor Moloney of Agtel, an independent television production company, devised the format of the programme. It was dictated primarily by costs, the RTÉ budget was tight and they could make it work only by having Eddie Hobbes present the programme on his own with no outside involvement, aside from the audience and the on-site interviewees. The audience was assembled from contacts with community groups, various fora and television advertisements asking for participants.

Researchers dug out most of the facts. For the roads segment of the third programme, they relied almost entirely on information compiled by RTÉ's Prime Time Investigates series.

In the first programme, he attacked the groceries order, which he claimed was responsible for maintaining high grocery prices. The Competition Authority in a recent report supports this contention and argues that the apprehension that the abolition of the order would lead to the collapse of small retail outlets is mistaken – the small retail outlets would continue to offer specialised services, including proximity and late opening, which would ensure their survival. This is a controversial view however and there is fear that if the grocery order is abolished the big multiples will undercut the smaller outlets, forcing them out of business, and increase their prices in a market that would be less competitive.

A highlight of that first programme was a visit he made to Trim, Co Meath, which had been denied a Lidl supermarket by the local authority. A local woman, who featured on the programme both in a film insert from Trim and in the studio itself, started a campaign to have the decision reversed and this succeeded. Hobbs represented this as a triumph for the ordinary consumer. However it appears that the number of signatures this woman had amassed, in support of her campaign, was far less than Hobbs represented and that the decision to reverse the planning refusal was taken by An Bord Pleanála.

In that first programme Hobbs made a big point that the largest portion of the average citizen's lifetime expenditure goes not on mortgage, nor household expenditure, nor on transport, but on taxation. The point he was making – a point made again on several occasions in the series – was that, contrary to the Government's claim of us living in a low-tax economy, we live in a high tax one. But the repetition of the point had another point as well, a hugely political one: that taxation is bad.

There was no examination of the alternatives to lowering taxation on cars, or drink or generally. No examination of how cutting taxes would impact on public services.

In the second programme he brilliantly highlighted the power of the licensed vintners' lobby and how Fianna Fáil backbenchers scuppered Michael McDowell's proposals on café bars. His filmed piece from Mountmellick, where the Fianna Fáil party office is right next door to the public house owned by the Fianna Fáil TD, John Maloney, who orchestrated opposition to café bars, was brilliantly done.

His visit to Athy to test whether the town with the most pubs per head of population had the worst drink problem of any town in Ireland (the corollary of the argument used by opponents to deregulating public licenses) was hilarious, with people on the street being invited to undertake sobriety tests.

The third programme on transport made the point about over expenditure on roads but not with the emphasis that surely the issue demands (see panel). It also understated the over expenditure on LUAS (see below). In highlighting the costs of importing a car from Northern Ireland it served to make the point about the tax on cars but failed to connect this with the related issues: what if the tax on cars were lower, how could we cope with the additional traffic and how would we finance public services dependant on the revenues from these taxes?

The last programme in the series (due to be broadcast on Monday 5 September) will deal with how people on average incomes cope – people living on €600 a week – and on the costs to women who want to return to work, transport, child care and other costs.

Fianna Fáil TDs and senators have threatened to have Hobbs and RTÉ before various Oireachtas Committees to answer charges of bias, exaggeration and misrepresentation. Affording him another platform to display his communication skills, his humour and his command of the subjects he addresses might prove a further embarrassment.

Eddie Hobbs

Eddie Hobbs was born 10 November 1962 and grew up in a middle-class family in Cork. He was the third generation of salesmen in his family – his grandfather was, he says, one of the first commercial reps in the country. He had wanted to study archaeology and history. But, he left school at 16 and joined Shield Life, now Eagle Star.

His father had become unwell when Hobbs was in his early teens and the family did not have the resources to put him through university. The father died at an early age.

Whilst he worked with Eagle Star, he studied at night, becoming a Fellow of the Life Insurance Association in 1986. He came first in the country in his exams. He moved to Dublin with Eagle Star around this time. At 25, he was appointed head of marketing but was becoming impatient with the company. In an interview with the RTÉ Guide earlier this year he said that he had no patience for working at Eagle Star, "At 28 years of age you just want to put your foot on the accelerator."

Doing so led him to leave Eagle Star and join with Tony Taylor, whose investment group went into liquidation a few years later, with Taylor himself being convicted subsequently for misappropriation of clients' funds. Hobbs was in no way culpable for what went wrong with the Taylor Investment Group and was, in part, responsible for "outing" Taylor and assisting in his arrest in England and his conviction for fraudulent conversion.

In 2004, Taylor sent a series of emails to newspapers baiting Hobbs. Hobbs isn't too worried: "given his extraordinary record I don't give much credence to what he (Taylor) has to say and haven't done so for the best part of ten years."

In October 2004 he was appointed to the Financial Regulator's new consumer consultancy panel, an indication that the Financial Regulator was not impressed by Taylor's allegations either.

Meanwhile in 1993, Hobbs published a damning report on endowment mortgages, which led to the ending of the lucrative endowment mortgage market in Ireland. He was also involved in a campaign to abolish the commissions agreement operated by the life insurance industry. This price-fixing arrangement was found to be anti-competitive by the Competition Authority in 1997. Hobbs persisted with his campaign for full disclosure of commissions on insurance products, which was eventually enshrined in legislation in 2001.

After the Taylor debacle he formed the new company Financial Engineering Network, with two former executives from Taylor Investments. He also became involved in the Consumer Association of Ireland, and is now their financial spokesperson, as well as a council member.

Currently he runs FDM, which advises clients on the finances – it has 150 corporate clients. His website www.eddiehobbs.com on which he advertises his company and himself, describes Hobbs with a quote from The Irish Times 21 May 2001 as, "the most powerful independent financial advisor in the State".

He is a large shareholder and a strategic development manager in 3Q Solutions, a company that sells software to sellers of financial products like pensions and insurance. The software helps them analyse their clients to ensure them they are selling them everything they possibly can. The blurb says 3Q helps companies "to maintain and increase financial service revenues from their high net worth and mass affluent customer base."

This involvement has raised questions about a conflict of interest between his professed role as guardian of the financial welfare of ordinary citizens and his engagement in a company that has the opposite purpose, at least theoretically.

In June 2005, he was nominated by the Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment, Micheál Martin, to the interim board of the National Consumer Agency, a statutory body set up to investigate consumer issues. He had gone to school, Colaiste Chriostai, with Micheál Martin, who was one year ahead of him. They know each other quite well. There is an irony in Hobb's encouragement to viewers of Rip Off Republic programme to send pamper baby nappies to his former school colleague, in protest against the groceries order, banning below cost selling.

Actually the first initiative of the National Consumer Agency was to assess consumer attitudes to the groceries order. In the press release announcing the agency he was described as a "consumer advocate".

He is seen by some nowadays as a "media tart". Before his television debut he was frequently on the radio or in newspapers advising on financial matters. Until recently, he also had a column in the Irish Examiner. His foray into television came in 2003 when the production company Agtel, asked him to front their new finance programme, Show Me The Money. The programme involves helping people, mainly couples, sort out their finances. It has been very successful – the second season pulling in average viewing figures of 528,000, putting it firmly in the top ten most watched programmes on RTÉ. The viewership is on par with TV3's Coronation Street. A third series is due soon. His facility for simplifying financial matters in Show Me the Money made him an obvious choice for Rip Off Republic. The format of mixing serious finance issues with comedy has meant that the show has been a huge success – pulling in an average half a million viewers. Dermot Jewell, Chief Executive of the Consumer Association, who works with Hobbs there says he has a "great turn of phrase, he's quick witted... very focused and specific on detail."

In May this year he released a book called Short Hands, Long Pockets: The Informed Guide to Debt and Spending, the royalties from which he donated to children's charities. In its first week it went to number one in the paperback non-fiction list and is the third bestselling title in the country overall.

He is always outspoken – when he appeared on Ryan Tubridy's late night programme he said it high time the Competition Authority was given powers to enable it to take the Government to court and to allow it to engage in bugging and surveillance activities in order to combat the market rigging, price fixing and cartels, which, he argues are endemic in the Irish market.

He lives in the Curragh Co Kildare, from where he runs FDM. He has a wife, Mary and they have four children together.