Eddie Hobbs

Hobbs worked for Zurich Life from 1979 to 1991, and left his position as Marketing Manager to set up a fee-based financial planning company TIPS. In March 1993 Hobbs published a report "Endowment Mortgages The Hometruth", which collapsed sales of endowment home-loans in Ireland by June 1993 after the banking and life insurance industry failed to deal with his critique. In 1995 Hobbs was made a non-executive director in the financial services firm Taylor Asset Management but resigned from it and TIPS in January 1996. In May 1996 after a two-month investigation, Hobbs lodged a complaint with the Irish regulator about the handling of two client files by Tony Taylor CEO of the Taylor Group. Tony Taylor fled Ireland and was located living under an alias in Eastbourne UK in 1999 by an investigator reporting to Hobbs. Taylor was extradited and pleaded guilty to five counts of fraud, forgery and destruction of documents for which he was sentenced to five years in prison.[6] Hobbs himself was never implicated in any issues relating to company affairs and in 2007 he was exonerated by the Irish High Court and praised by the presiding judge for showing "efficiency and determination and for not standing idly" when he pursued Taylor's activities from 1995 to 1996.

He published a report after obtaining Irish data on saving policy lapse rates captured in a UK Government study and proved that one in three Irish savers lost 100% of their contributions and that another one in three got back less than they put in.

Consequently, in 1996 he submitted a complaint to The Competition Authority alleging that the Government supported Irish Insurance Federation Remuneration Agreement was offensive to competition law since 1991, had engendered a culture of consensus decision-making, restricted competition and prevented costs and commission disclosure to consumers. The complaint was upheld in 1998 forcing the Government to introduce statutory commission and charges disclosure and transform the consumer experience. The Life industry was forced to reissue its product range to comply with the Insurance Act 2000. Hobbs acted in a voluntary capacity as a director and Finance spokesperson for The Consumers association of Ireland from 1993 to 2006. He has qualifications in accounting, finance and financial planning. Hobbs' complaint to the EU Taxation Commission that the Irish tax code was being adjusted to create competitive advantage to domestic Irish funds in breach of The Treaty of Rome, resulted in the Commission writing to Finance Minister McCreevy who adjusted the new gross roll-up tax regime to all OECD funds. When Minister McCreevy announced the SSIA savings scheme, Hobbs launched the Consumers Association of Ireland 'Savermark' standard that required banks to link deposit interest to the ECB base rate movements to prevent margins widening. Over €10bn in savings went into tracker deposit accounts. Hobbs accused the Life Insurance industry of colluding to avoid the 'Savermark' pricing and called for a Competition Authority investigation.

He presented the RTÉ show Rip-Off Republic in 2005, a show preoccupied with artificially high development land prices, the perceived high personal taxes, corporate margins and cartels/monopolies in Ireland.[7] (The term 'Ripoff Republic' was first used in an article in The Irish Independent in 2003 by consumer affairs journalist Eddie Lennon). In it Hobbs claimed, in a reference to land prices and inflated costs that "Ireland was eating its young". In Rip Off Republic Hobbs advised consumers to post nappies to the Dept of Enterprise Trade & Employment to object to the Groceries Order 1987 because nappies were listed as a grocery and the Act made it an offence for retailers to pass through discounts from manufacturers. Thousands of nappies were posted and the Groceries Order was repealed by Government 2005.

Prior to this, Hobbs presented the television show Show Me the Money, where he helped various people, from farmers to hairdressers, to improve their finances and which won two IFTA TV awards. He has also presented a three-part programme, 30 Things to do with your SSIA, in which he gives a humorous list of ideas for spending the money held in a Special Savings Incentive Account (SSIA).[8] Notably he advised people against investing their SSIAs, along with borrowed bank money, in Irish Investment Property (RIPS) and explained investment in property PLCs as a better choice. He outlined Minsky's bubble theory and suggested the Irish market was at the latter steps of it. In Show Me the Money he repeatedly advised since 2004 that property prices in Ireland are only going down, and strongly advised against residential investment property purchase in Ireland. In 2007 Irish property prices started to reverse. An outspoken populist critic of the vested interests in Ireland, especially the producer groups who "control the country", Hobbs has often repeated that "There's one game in town: development." He spoke out against Jumbo mortgages. In his 2006 book, LOOT, he advised readers to reduce debt to under 50% of assets, move to AAA rated banks, exit equities, buy bonds and own some gold, two years later the global financial crisis emerged.

During the run up to the 2007 Irish general election, Hobbs and his colleague Matt Cooper presented a political programme called Polls Apart on Irish TV station TV3, in which they interview the main Irish political party leaders about what they intend to do after the election, if they were to be elected into government.[9]

He co-presented RTÉ's The Consumer Show from 2010 to 2012. He quit the show in 2012 after concerns of being 'stifled'.[10] He regularly appears in media debates on the nature of the Irish economic austerity policy heavily critical of the cross subsidisation of the public sector and inaction in dealing with Irish consumer insolvency. He presented My Civil War, a social history TV programme on the Irish Civil War with RTÉ's documentary unit. In November 2013 he presented an hour long pilot of 'The Give or Take Club' an experiment in social co-operation based in a rural town in a joint venture between Endemol, RTÉ, Independent Pictures and the presenter.

In 2005 Hobbs was awarded Honorary Patronage of the Trinity College Dublin University Philosophical Society.

Hobbs was appointed by the Irish Government as a Director of the National Consumer Agency in 2007 having served on its interim board since 2005. Hobbs was criticised in 2008 by the Irish Independent for poor attendance of NCA board meetings, which he acknowledged and blamed on poor scheduling.[18] Hobbs redesigned from the NCA in 2009, citing his discomfort with a loan given to another board member as well unhappiness with Minister for Enterprise Mary Coughlan, whom the NCA reported to.[19]

In 2011 Hobbs was made an honorary life member of the University College Dublin Law Society for his contributions as a consumer advocate.

In 2013 Hobbs helped set up Own Our Oil, a citizens advocacy group focused on overhauling Ireland's oil and gas licensing regime,[20] and made a pre-Budget submission in July 2013 calling for the sale of licences to be treated like development land rezoning, and subject to Capital Gains Tax of 66% to recover economic rents to the Irish people.[21] In March 2014 Hobbs launched Own Our Oil – the Fight for Ireland's Economic Freedom, a compilation of essays from a multi-discipline team of writers covering, planning, environment, taxation, strategy, industry, geology, and history, commencing a national public briefing campaign. During the Irish Water controversy Hobbs has called for the redrafting of Article 10 of the Irish Constitution to return the ownership of all natural resources to The Irish People from ownership by The State which it took in the 1937 Constitution, reducing the State role to a trustee required to act in the common good but justiciable through the Courts when in breach of its duties. This was a move designed to alienate the ability of the State to sell off natural resources, including water to preserve itself during future crises.

On 29 June 2021, Hobbs tweeted "badges so the terrified can identify the unvaccinated among us"; the tweet included a Star of David.[22] The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum replied that comparing the Holocaust to COVID-19 vaccines "that saves human lives is a sad symptom of moral and intellectual decline". Hobbs deleted the initial tweet and in response tweeted "Vaccine Passports instead of antigen testing is morally the wrong move", describing it as a "slippery slope".[22] He campaigned intensively using Twitter on two issues, the use of vaccine passports to segregate Irish people and vaccinating healthy children at lower risk to Covid than to the vaccines.

• Official website
• Eddie Hobbs at IMDb