No off-switch: Hobbs rips through the Republic

IF the hugely successful viewing figures for Rip-off Republic indicate anything - one-in-two of the watching audience tuned in to the first show - it’s that Eddie Hobbs has come to be regarded as something of a people’s advocate; a “consumer campaigner”, as he terms it.

However, were it not for a change of heart while still a teenager, he could have been doing public service of a very different kind.

Born in 1962 on the southside of Cork city, Hobbs went to work for Cork Corporation (now city council) after finishing his Leaving Certificate at Colaiste Chríost Rí.

But, as he tells the story himself, a summer of doing little but crossword puzzles made him yearn for something a little more challenging.

He began studying for a career in financial services via the Insurance Institute of Ireland.

In 1978, at the tender age of 16, he landed his first job in the insurance sector when he began working with Eagle Star, and continued his studies by night. In an interview with the Irish Examiner’s sister paper, the Evening Echo, last year, he said: “At 24, I was transferred to Dublin to head up the technical training area of Eagle Star Life.

“Then, a couple of years later, I was in marketing, reporting to the board.”

In 1990, he set up his own company, offering financial advisory and planning services. Around the same time, he became interested in consumer campaigning, principally because of concerns “about the way the (insurance) industry dealt with people”.

“Some people were being ripped off by high-charging, non-transparent contracts. I tried to create an internal debate within the insurance industry about it.”

Unsurprisingly, he found the industry unresponsive. “So I went public.”

His name quickly made the front pages after he began a campaign to expose the risks associated with endowment mortgage policies.

This brought him to the attention of the Consumers’ Association of Ireland, which elected him as a council member. He has been the association’s spokesman on financial services ever since.

In 1998, he took an action under the Competition Act alleging that the insurance industry was acting like a cartel. The Government eventually introduced legislation requiring full disclosure of commissions on insurance products.

Since then, Mr Hobbs contributed regularly to the likes of Prime Time, the Late Late Show, Morning Ireland, and numerous other programmes, before fronting one of his own.

Show Me The Money, an RTÉ programme whereby he offered expert advice to people suffering financial difficulties, proved a smash hit, and was followed up with a best-selling book in the same vein, Short Hands, Long Pockets: The Informed Guide to Debt and Spending, the royalties from which Mr Hobbs has elected to donate to a children’s charity.

But it is his new show which has provoked arguably the biggest reaction yet. Members of the public are livid because of the rip-offs he has exposed; members of the Government are livid because they feel they are being blamed for these rip-offs.

Mr Hobbs cannot defend accusations that the show is unbalanced - he is currently on holidays - but he will surely be unrepentant. “I wouldn’t call myself an activist - that sounds like I’m in the consumer Hezbollah,” he once said.

“But I have been prepared to stand up and say to banks (and politicians): ‘Hang on, that line you’re spinning is lies’.”

It’s not just in Government circles, though, that Mr Hobbs is making enemies. Business figures (apart from the ones he or his company, FDM, are providing advice to) don’t like him all that much, either.

For that reason, there would have been some smirking in those circles recently when it was reported that the financial services regulator, IFSRA, had received a complaint about Mr Hobbs from the disgraced financial adviser, Tony Taylor.

Mr Hobbs was a director of one of the companies in Mr Taylor’s group before the latter fled Ireland in 1996, leaving a number of clients high and dry. Mr Taylor was convicted of fraud several years later.

Mr Hobbs, who took part in the effort to have Mr Taylor returned to Ireland to stand trial, said the complaint was a “vexatious” one, and has insisted that he has “never acted unlawfully”.

Mr Hobbs sits on IFSRA’s consumer panel, and was recently appointed by Enterprise Minister Micheál Martin to the National Consumer Agency.