Never mind the begrudgers, Eddie — just keep up the good work

JUDGE Liam Hamilton once said to me that he was sure he would get no thanks for exposing the malpractices in the beef industry, and all the other stuff that surrounded it.

In the end, he funked the job, for whatever reason. I know that Judge Feargus Flood was seriously worried about the campaigns that were run against him and several of his witnesses. In the end, he rose to the challenge. He blew the whistle.

Being a whistleblower is no fun. Whistleblowers are motivated by all sorts of different reasons, but the one thing they all have in common is that they get to a position that is very lonely. It mightn't seem like that, but when you're having the excrement of the establishment heaped on your head, it hurts.

Eddie Hobbs is our latest whistleblower. He has taken the lid off a side of public life and policy that our establishment doesn't want discussed. About a week ago a former colleague and I were discussing the latest edition of Rip Off Republic.

"I wonder how long it will be," my friend wondered, "before they start piling on the dirt on Eddie Hobbs?"

He didn't have long to wait, did he? Eddie Hobbs has done the unforgivable. He has managed to expose Government incompetence and inefficiency in a way that has really stung them. And now he is going to reap the whirlwind.

Several times over the last weekend I read the suggestion that Hobbs won't do a programme about financial services because he has so many conflicts of interest in that area. I read the accusation that he charges families in difficult circumstances a lot for his services. I read the history of his association with the discredited criminal Tony Taylor. I listened on radio to one journalist excoriating him for (horror of horrors) failing to reveal any new facts. And of course there has been a stream of political and other criticism to the effect that he has got his research and his facts wrong.

In one thoughtful piece I read, by Mary Raftery in the Irish Times, Hobbs was accused of a lack of balance, and of making what was essentially a series of anti-tax programmes. Raftery, herself a public service broadcaster of the highest calibre who never pulls her punches when Government policies need to be criticised, was, I think, rather put off by the mix of comedy, satire, and factual programming in the series.

I have to say it seemed to me that Hobbs was consistent throughout the series in arguing that the waste of public money was the real rip-off, rather than that it was wrong in the first place to apply tax to things like cars.

But what is one to make of the other accusations? I don't hold any candle for Eddie Hobbs I met him once in my life, when he appeared as a guest on a TV series I was involved in. I suspect there is virtually nothing in Hobbs's political outlook and philosophy with which I would agree. In that sense, I understand why people like Mary Raftery would be uncomfortable with him because he's not likely ever to be joining the likes of us in campaigning for more government spending on social services.

But on the programme where I met him, he was extremely critical of banking practices and of the lack of competition in the financial services sector. Time after time on radio I have heard him say the same thing, that the consumer is the last thing on the minds of bankers. I know that if you ask any senior banker in Ireland what they think of Eddie Hobbs, the air will turn blue. I have no idea why he didn't include a programme on banking practices in his series, but on the basis of his track record, in the Irish Examiner and on radio and television, I have no reason to believe he would have been any kinder to the banking sector if he had.

Does he charge families in difficult circumstances for his services? Is he therefore a rip-off merchant himself and too big a hypocrite to be taken seriously? I certainly read that in one newspaper. I didn't read any evidence for the assertion, or any quotes from any of the families he was alleged to have ripped off. Maybe he does do that he certainly seems to charge handsome fees (about the same as a dentist, I reckon, and a lot less than a lawyer). But if any of his clients felt they had been cheated in some way by him, they seemed reluctant to say so to the media.

WHAT of the Tony Taylor accusation? Tony Taylor ran a company called Taylor Asset Management. It went bust, investors funds were stolen, and Tony Taylor went on the run. Eddie Hobbs was a senior employee of the firm. There were, as I understand it, a number of detailed investigations into what happened, and Tony Taylor was convicted of defrauding his clients. No charges were ever laid against other employees of the firm, including Hobbs.

It may be, of course, that this isn't the full story. It does seem to me, I must admit, that if people insist on associating Hobbs with the criminal he worked for, they ought to spell out what their real doubts are. Do they think Hobbs has something to hide? If not, is it fair to keep repeating the innuendo of guilt by association? And the last criticism I mentioned above that Hobbs hasn't revealed new facts in his series? This criticism was contained in a tirade by Frank Fitzgibbon, business editor of the Sunday Times, on Eamonn Dunphy's Newstalk morning programme. He went on to say that the success of the programme was a reflection on its audience. Dunphy described his intervention as patronising I would have said it was fatuous to the point of being impertinent. If journalism depended on new facts, some of our newspapers would be very thin. Of course there was little that was new in the series if you were an aficionado of it.

But what good journalism does is tell a story in a way that makes it accessible or, at its best, gripping to readers. That's what Eddie Hobbs has done. He's taken facts and woven them into a fascinating tale. Perhaps not all the facts were correct in every detail, but the story is a true one. Eddie Hobbs has blown the whistle on Government mismanagement and incompetence, and he has done it in a way that is graphic and captures an audience.

We may not like what they tell us, and we may not always trust them, but whistleblowers do a public service. Very little of what we have learned about big business and politics over the last few years would have been exposed without a whistleblower.

All of them need protection, for the simple reason that our democracy needs to hear what they have to tell us. So keep going, Eddie Hobbs and don't let the begrudgers get you down!