"Before I ever appeared on television I was an opinionated b****x", says George Hook. "I'm not different today. I'm still an opinionated b****x. What you see is me. It's not false and it's not fabricated. And you can like it or lump it!"

RTÉ Sport's most pugnacious pundit (and that includes Mr Dunphy) is telling it the only way he can. Straight from the lip and with both barrels loaded. George Hook's crusty voice, redolent of his Cork origins and a thousand and one late nights, booms down the telephone line. In the background is the white noise of the radio station, Newstalk, where Hook earns a crust five days a week with his pugilistic talk show, The Right Hook.

But he has more than a few plates spinning. He has just finished a documentary called Hook in Haiti (he visited the country last autumn) and is gearing up for a much hyped 6 Nations. There's much to talk about, not that gregarious George needs any excuse to chew the cud.
In fact, George's big gob got him to Haiti last September. It happened when he was interviewing the founder of the NGO Haven, Leslie Buckley. The subject was a house-building mission to Haiti. Acting on impulse, Hook said that he'd go too: the very first volunteer. It was a tough, eye-opening trip that was filmed by RTÉ.

Then came the news of the devastating earthquake. "I felt absolute despair because I knew that their infrastructure was so basic that even shovels were in short supply", he says. "The initial death toll figures were 30,000 but from my experience I knew that it would be much higher." The documentary was edited to incorporate the devastation of recent days but Hook plans to go back to Haiti. He says he just has to.

George Hook was born in working-class Cork. The family home was on the Albert Road, a terraced house with an outside toilet. His father, George, worked as a clerk for CIE while his mother, Anne, poured all her money into her son's education. For summer holidays, there were trips to Myrtleville just outside the city, so it wasn't Angela's Ashes; not that he paints it that way. For Hook, many others were in the same boat and he just got on with it. He says that his father was his mentor. "He used to say that your first thought is probably the best one, so I've kind of lived my life that way", he says. "Although it hasn't always been the best way."

Hook has had a chequered career. After leaving school, he went into the catering trade. Why? "Because I met a fellow in a pub and he told me that it was a good idea", he chuckles. "I also bought my house having seen only one room in it. I'm impulsive, there's no question about that."
His mother was the cornerstone of the family: a strong woman who ran the home (every week her husband handed over the pay packet minus a few quid for cigarettes and beers). "My mother was your best friend but if you did her wrong she became your best enemy", he says. "She was capable of extremes of love and hate. I'm my mother's son. I can oscillate very quickly between great love and great hate. There is no middle ground. That's not necessarily a good thing but it is what I am."

For most of his rollercoaster business life, Hook owed money left, right and centre. "I spent thirty years as a failure in the catering business", he says. He borrowed from Peter to pay Paul but sometimes it wasn't enough. He did things that still bedevil him: the guilt of pledging his mother's house against a bad debt or the shame of occasional failures as husband and a father. There were spirals into depression and at various times, he thought about ending it all: swerving his car into a petrol truck and then a late-night walk down Dun Laoghaire when he stripped down to his underwear and came as close as hell to diving into the depths.

At rock bottom it was his wife, Ingrid, who pulled him through. Married since 1969, they have three children (George, Alison and Michelle). "Ten years ago she gave me an ultimatum: 'change or go!' I changed and saved my marriage", he says.

He also believes that she saved his life. "There is no way that I'd be talking to you today, there's no way that I'd be alive, there's no way that I'm be employed, there's not way that I'd be a whole person without her. I battle every day of my life with elements of depression. But what I learned more than anything else is to understand others. That's why I spend so much time talking to young people and organisations and why I talk so openly about what I call the black dog of depression. I think that if people talk about it, well then, they might think 'if he can cope with it, maybe I can'."

Last year, he was quoted as saying he doesn't have an ego. Was he serious? "Oh yeah", he insists. "I don't have any ego in that I don't see myself as a celebrity or famous or anything like that. My name is in the phonebook and I wouldn't be worried if it all ends tomorrow." He also rejects the accusation that his punditry is a thing of noise and fury and largely signifying nothing. Or 'sensationalist' as Brian O'Driscoll once put it. Hook is bemused, citing his track record as a coach with Connacht and the USA and how he also coached O'Driscoll in his first-ever World Cup.

His convictions, he argues, are real. Just like the tension that sometimes hangs in the studio air when Tom McGurk, Brent Pope and Hook square up to each other. "Over the last decade there have been occasions when we have been close to throwing punches", he says. "There are real tensions and real differences of opinion that have never gone away."

Despite the grumpy image, Hook is a happy man. Asked his age, he quips that he's old enough to carry a bus pass. And having been to the bottom of the barrel, he is now blissfully content. "Going through all those bad times made me realise that it's never going to get any worse", he says. "So what if RTÉ sack me or I lose my pension fund on the stock exchange or whatever? I just say to hell with it! It can't get any worse. Standing at the end of Dún Laoghaire pier taking my clothes off and Ingrid giving me that ultimatum happened in the same calendar year. I knew then that there's nothing worse than losing my life or losing my wife and family. So if I conquered that, anything else is going to pale into insignificance.