Eddie Hobbs
Eddie Hobbs is an Irish financial adviser, writer, campaigner, podcaster, and former television presenter and political figure.
Hobbs rose to prominence in the 1990s through consumer advocacy in the financial sector. In 1993, he published a report titled Endowment Mortgages: The Hometruth, which examined the sale of insurance-linked investment products used to repay home mortgages. As a director of the Consumers Association of Ireland, he submitted a complaint to the Competition Authority concerning fee transparency in the insurance industry. In 1998, the Competition Authority ruled that the industry had operated practices that obscured charges from consumers. Hobbs subsequently advised the Government on the Consumer Credit Act and contributed to the development of the Insurance Act 2000, which introduced disclosure requirements for the market.
Hobbs rose to further prominence in the 2000s as a consumer advocate on RTÉ, presenting programmes including Show Me The Money, The Give or Take Club, Rip-Off Republic, My Civil War, and 30 Things to Do with Your SSIA. During this period he developed a public profile through television, radio, print media, and book publishing, and was noted for commentary on the cost of living and government economic policy.
Hobbs is the director of Hobbs Financial Practice Ltd, a financial services firm. In 2007, he co-founded Brendan Investments, a property fund focused on overseas markets, serving as a non-executive director until early 2015. In 2017, media reports stated that the fund had lost approximately 90 per cent of its investors' capital.
In 2015, Hobbs co-founded the political party Renua and served as its president. He resigned in 2016 after the party failed to win Dáil representation. He stated that he had sought to move the party away from social conservatism towards a liberal democratic orientation.
From the late 2010s, Hobbs has commented on topics including COVID-19 policy, media regulation, immigration, gender-affirming healthcare, and international governance through organisations such as the WHO, UN, and WEF. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he expressed scepticism regarding lockdowns, mRNA vaccinations, and referenced organisations including the Rothschilds, Bilderberg Group, and Soros Foundation in discussions of international coordination.
Hobbs presents Counterpoint, a current affairs interview series, on YouTube and other platforms. Hobbs has interviewed figures including Steve Bannon, Malachy Steenson, Ben Gilroy, Derek Blighe, Francis Boyle, Judith Curry, Douglas Macgregor, Alan Shatter, Ken O'Flynn, and Linda de Courcy.
In January 2026, Hobbs organised the IRL Forum in Ashbourne, County Meath, a two-day event featuring twelve panels on Irish policy topics. The US Ambassador attended the event. The Irish Times published commentary critical of Hobbs on the opening day; Hobbs responded in a letter published by the newspaper.
Television career
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.. In Rip Off Republic, Hobbs advised consumers to post nappies to the Department 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 the government in 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. Notably, he advised people against investing their SSIAs, along with borrowed bank money, in Irish Investment Property 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 book, LOOT, published in 2006 - two years before the 2008 financial crisis, he advised readers to reduce debt to under 50% of assets, move to AAA rated banks, exit equities, buy bonds and own some gold.
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 interviewed the main Irish political party leaders about what they intend to do after the election, if they were to be elected into government.
He co-presented RTÉ's The Consumer Show from 2010 to 2012. He quit the show in 2012 after concerns of being 'stifled'. 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.
Other work
Writer
In 2004, he released Short Hands Long Pockets his first book as a fundraiser for The Jack & Jill Children's Foundation for whom he acts as patron since 2005. His second book LOOT! was published in 2006. In March 2009, Hobbs released his third book, Debt Busters by Currach Press.During the 2020 lockdown, he commenced work on a historical fiction novel, The First Heresy, announced by Liberties Press to be published in February 2022.
Journalism
From 2007 to 2010, Hobbs was editorial director of monthly magazine You & Your Money owned and published by Ashville Publications. He wrote weekly columns for The Daily Star, Sunday Independent and Sunday Business Post.Hobbs campaigned against a government levy on private pension savings, encouraging savers to instruct pension trustees to refuse Revenue Commissioners' demands. The Finance Act responded by providing for a €380 daily fine for trustees who delayed payment. Hobbs also directed a letter campaign urging President McAleese to refer the Act to the Supreme Court; she signed it into law. The total taken in the pension levy to 2015 is estimated at €2bn.
In a 2012 The Wall Street Journal, Hobbs described the Irish Government as "a Vichy government—captive externally to creditors and internally to a tribe of insiders led by union godfathers in a deal that protects the government's own excessive pay and pensions while bankers lean over its shoulders to rewrite insolvency laws. This isn't just crony capitalism. It's crony democracy".
Hobbs has acknowledged miscalculating post-2008 inflation expectations; having advised mortgage holders to fix rates in anticipation of inflation, the ECB instead cut rates to historic lows.
In 2007, as a non-executive director, he helped launch Brendan Investments Plc, a ten-year collective investment in European property for smaller investors, after obtaining Central Bank approval as the first retail investment product to comply with the EU Prospectus Directive. The intake at under €13m fell short of expectations and although entering the stable German commercial property market, the vehicle was set back by early losses when its anchor tenant, Germany's largest retail group Arcandor went into liquidation during the banking crisis and by restricted bank credit. He retired as a non-executive director 2015 when he was appointed a president of a new political party, Renua. Two-and-a-half years later the company was liquidated after experiencing heavy losses in the Detroit housing refurbishing market following a valuation slump in 2016—2019 caused by a lead water crisis that erupted in Flint to the north.
Politics
In the spring of 2015, Hobbs was a co-founder of Renua, a new political party formed by breakaway members of Fine Gael, most prominently Lucinda Creighton who served as its first leader. As part of the party's formal launch on 13 March 2015, Hobbs appeared alongside Creighton on a segment on The Late Late Show to explain what the party stood for. On the day, there was initial confusion about whether Hobbs would stand as a Renua candidate in the forthcoming 2016 Irish general election, with Hobbs downplaying the prospect but Renua's official website listing him as a candidate. Hobbs never did stand for the party but acted as the party's president from its launch until June 2016.Hobbs resigned from Renua in June 2016 after the party failed to get any of its candidates elected in 2016, including its leader Lucinda Creighton, despite securing 2.5% of the vote and Government funding, one of its key targets. During his time as party president, Hobbs has claimed he attempted to get the party to alter its positioning from being a socially conservative party to a Liberal Democratic one in the same vein as the UK's Liberal Democrats. However, Hobbs felt his efforts were futile as the vast majority of members for the party were those who joined on the belief that Renua would be, either explicitly or subtly, an anti-abortion party. Hobbs has also claimed he wanted to make a key plank of the party that they would advocate for using a Social Progress Index instead of GDP.
In 2019, Hobbs fundraised and sponsored a paper from Professor Cal Muckley of University College Dublin advocating for a Social Progress Index for Ireland. It was launched in February 2020 and adopted by the Irish Business and Employers Confederation and Irish Small and Medium Enterprise Association as key policies, later becoming the opening feature in the Programme for Government by the Fine Gael Fianna Fail and Green coalition.
In March 2022, Hobbs described his political orientation as a "radical centrist".
Awards and posts held
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. He was criticised in 2008 by the Irish Independent for poor attendance of NCA board meetings, which he acknowledged and blamed on poor scheduling. He resigned 2009, citing his discomfort with a loan given to another board member and dissatisfaction with Minister for Enterprise Mary Coughlan, whom the NCA reported to.In 2013, Hobbs helped set up Own Our Oil, a citizens advocacy group focused on overhauling Ireland's oil and gas licensing regime, 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. 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 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, 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.
Political and conspiratorial views
Vaccination Passports controversy
On 29 June 2021, Hobbs tweeted "badges so the terrified can identify the unvaccinated among us"; the tweet included a Star of David. 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". He campaigned intensively using Twitter on two issues, the use of vaccine passports to segregate Irish people and vaccinating healthy children at lower risk from Covid than from the vaccines.In an interview with Steve Bannon, Hobbs described the Irish mainstream media as "the North Korea of Europe." He focuses on agnogenesis, manufactured ignorance from propaganda, and the diminution in critical thinking and the takeover of stakeholder capitalism in Irish policymaking.