Eddie made a great solo-run, but now the heavy tackles are going in

LIKE many who had been away for a couple of weeks in August I returned from my holidays bemused as to what all the fuss was about Eddie Hobbs and his Rip Off Republic TV series.

I have had the chance since to see a couple of the programmes and have come to a better appreciation of the reason for their impact.

Firstly they are good television. They're snappy, well produced and fronted by a straight-talking pundit with the timing of a good comedian. The series did the theoretically impossible in making economics interesting. Some of the success of the programmes is attributable to the fact that it resonates with a sense of public annoyance about prices and the cost of services.

However, the entertainment quality of the programmes and their presenter also explains why it has attracted record audience numbers for August. Nothing impacts on public debate as much as television. In Ireland, as elsewhere, when people are asked what source they most rely on and trust for their information about public and political issues, the overwhelming majority say television.

The timing of the series also gave it an impact even wider than its own large viewing audience. In the echo chamber that is the August silly season anything prominent on television attracts an even greater amount of follow-up coverage in the print media and on radio outlets struggling to fill space.

The other reality is that Hobbs has had the argument to himself for most of August. For the first three weeks of his programmes his pro-competition and anti-government lines went unchecked by any substantial rebuttal from a dormant Government media machine.

Inevitably a handful of Government backbenchers were only too happy to inhale the rare oxygen of publicity that August affords them by attacking the programmes, but most of them fell into the inevitable trap of attacking the messenger rather than the message.

It was, frankly, politically silly to allege that there might be inaccuracies in Rip Off Republic and that Hobbs and RTÉ would be hauled over the coals for any such. The three editions of the programme I saw struck me as very well researched and carefully scripted. I suspect most viewers came away with the same impression. While the ideas used in Eddie's talks were presented most favourably to advance his side of the argument, they were largely accurate. Most of the facts he cited were already in the public domain and indeed many of them were published by Government agencies.

Similarly it was unwise to suggest or imply that the programmes breached the legal requirements on RTÉ to be unbiased. There is indeed a statutory obligation imposed on RTÉ in the treatment of matters which are either of public controversy or the subject of current public debate to be fair to all interests concerned and to present such issues in an objective and impartial manner.

However, RTE's mandate also provides that if it proves impractical to fulfil the fairness requirement for all concerned in a single programme, then they can do so across the schedule. While giving the stage to Hobbs on his own over four programmes skirts the limits of what is permissible in that regard, RTÉ can quiet rightly point to the platform given, for example, to Government ministers in a range of news programmes in recent days as balancing the space given to Hobbs.

The point is that instead of attacking the success of the programme or the nature of its presentation, what the Government and its spokespersons should have being doing in August was engaging with the argument Hobbs was making. Some of what he had to say could and should have been countered the rest of it should be accepted and the problems he has highlighted tackled.

In fairness, now that its heavy hitters are back from their holidays, this is what the Government has begun to do. Brian Cowen has made the point that income levels have been rising much faster than price increases. Across the board our inflation has been incredibly low in recent years.

Micheál Martin has also pointed out that some of the arguments Hobbs made were simplistic. While Eddie's views on the Groceries Order, for example, are at one with those of the Competition Authority, he is at variance with a spectrum of other opinion which supports its retention, ranging from Fine Gael to the St Vincent de Paul.

THE Taoiseach, somewhat less convincingly, has tried the shoulder-shrugging approach to the programme's criticisms with comments along the lines, "I haven't seen the programmes, and anyway they don't bother me."

Left-wing commentators, whom one would have expected to argue against some of the economic thesis advanced by Hobbs, were also quiet during the month of August. However, that has also changed in recent days. Now that they, too, have returned from their holidays a number of them have challenged the Hobbisian analysis and in particular his criticisms that the country is over-taxed. These have included the current affairs producer Mary Rafferty and even Vincent Browne, neither of whom could ever be described as champions of the Government's cause. Hobbs has provided no alternative as to how the resources currently raised in these direct taxes are to be replaced. Neither does he say what public expenditure currently funded by that indirect taxation should be cut.

In fact, this anti indirect taxation premise underlying the Hobbs message is one which can easily be displaced. Indirect taxation, and especially indirect taxes focused on luxury items, are on balance more socially progressive than raising income taxes. By their very nature indirect taxes which are on disposable, not original, income are paid in larger quantities by those who spend more.

Food and other basic items are exempt from indirect taxes and some exemptions are also given for groups like first-time house purchasers. There is an innate fairness in taking additional tax revenue from those households who have the available resources to purchase a second large car or a holiday home.

Where Eddie Hobbs's argument has been more effective is on the question of overruns on the costs of major infrastructure projects and bad spending decisions by the Government. It is impossible for the Government to argue about some of these because serious mistakes were made; the millions spent on the ill-fated attempt to introduce electronic voting and the sweetheart funding for projects like the Punchestown centre are two of the worst examples.

However, as Brian Cowen has pointed out, some of the comparisons between initial costs quoted for some infrastructure projects and the final costs did not compare like with like.

Also the Government can justifiably point to a belated but significant overhaul of public procurement procedures. In the case of large-scale road projects this has been particularly effective and, as a result, is delivering projects like the Dundalk by-pass six months ahead of schedule, and on budget. The priority now for Government must be to deliver public service reform while ensuring that the mistakes on overspending and unaccountability are not repeated.