The Amazing Adventures of the Honest and All Knowing Declan Ganley - Wisdom Incarnate

I came across the transcript of Libertas' appearance at the Oireachtas Sub Committee hearings on the Lisbon vote over at the CedarLounge Revolution. The meeting was interesting and once more we were treated to the spectacle of Ganley's ability to talk out of both sides of his mouth with not-quite-able help from fellow Libertas campaigner Caroline Simons. The full transcript is worth a read, but only if you have a high BS tolerance.

One of my favourite Ganley quotes from the hearings is the following:

I beg members not to make the mistake of recommending a re-run of the referendum. Why? Because it would be lost. It does not matter what newspapers state about polls on a particular day. It would be lost and it would be lost for a multitude of reasons which would just compound the issues that resulted in the “No” vote on the last occasion. They should not do it, because there would be a “No” vote and that would be a bigger issue for everybody to deal with than the opportunity we now have. Let us not have another referendum.

Ganley, who we all know would have folded up Libertas had the referendum been won by the government, has looked into his heart and, for the good of the nation, decided that there's no point in having another referendum. After all, we all know what happened when the nation was last asked to vote on a European treaty for a second time....

Interestingly, Ganley admits that he supported the second Nice treaty vote, and provides an interesting justification for it:

At the time, there had been a general election between Nice I and Nice II. In that general election, parties campaigned and made promises in their manifestos to the effect that they would hold another referendum. The people had the opportunity to voice their opinion in a democratic way and there was a democratic mandate, of sorts, to hold a second referendum. There is no such mandate at present in respect of the Lisbon treaty.

Does Ganley seriously believe that if a general election were held in the morning, Sinn Fein would be brought to power? In all honesty, there's no question of whether or not there will be a second vote on Lisbon. It will happen, but it will happen after a 'respectable' amount of time and after certain assurances regarding sensitive issues have been received. No party will announce their opposition to a treaty re-run in the run up to the next election, and it's likely that both Fianna Fail and Fianna Gael will commit to a re-run. Hell, there's a chance that between now and the 2009 local elections the government and opposition parties might commit to a second referendum on the Lisbon Treaty. If that were to happen, would Ganley then drop his opposition to a second vote? The danger for Ganley is that if Libertas runs candidates in the European elections, and these candidates fail to make an impact, then the government could, by his standards, claim that it would be justified in having a second vote.

Other interesting Ganley quotes include the following:

Our membership of the European Union has contributed to the likelihood that my children will, I hope, not speak with the same accent as I do. It could be a worse accent, but not much worse.

I'm sure that'll go down well with Ganley's friends in UKIP!

The Union should grow closer together but competences should be exercised at the most local level possible and be democratic. However, it makes sense for certain areas, such as foreign and security policy, to be run at a Union level because great efficiencies can be derived from so doing.

O-kay.

This is what's so frustrating about the anti-Lisbon campaigners. They appeal to the fears of every group. Ganley feels that Lisbon didn't go far enough in centralising foreign and security policy in Brussels, yet the likes of the Peace and Neutrality Alliance created 'no' voters by playing on people's fears that it meant we'd lose control over foreign policy.

Anyway, Ganley continues:

I do not know if members think of such an arrangement as federal or confederal and they can call it whatever they want. However, as long as it is democratic and the people get to decide, I am happy with it. As we all know, the people are sovereign.

Democracy is such a lovely word. It has the kind of effect that 'holy' or 'sacred' would once have had in the eyes of many. It's not a particularly useful word though.

Critics of the EU always tend to point to the democratic deficit, and perhaps, they're right to do so. It's just hard to think of an alternative that would satisfy such critics. Most of the power in the EU is shared between the Council of Ministers and the Commission. Commissioners are appointed by member states' governments while Ministers are elected representatives from the member states. The European Parliament is directly elected.

The only real way that the EU could become more democratic would be if Commissioners were directly elected or if more powers were given to the parliament (which was what the Lisbon Treaty proposed), or the newly elected Commission.

Ganley later described the European Parliament as the only democratic institution of the EU. That is an incredibly narrow definition of democratic. Presumably, Ganley believes that the office of Taoiseach is not undemocratic. Unlike the presidency, the Taoiseach is not directly elected by the people. He is appointed by his peers in the Dail. Is the office of the President more democratic than the office of the Taoiseach? What then of the HSE? The Navy? Enterprise Ireland?

By the standards of most, if an individual is appointed to a post by an elected official or by a parliament, then that's hardly undemocratic so long as the person or people doing the appointing have a constitution basis for doing so. We may be a step removed from the decision making process, but so long as we still have the ability to elect and/or remove the decision makers, democracy is preserved and usually served.

In questioning Ganley, Deirdre de Burca of the Green Party addressed the problems with Ganley's vision of democracy:

I wish to tease out Mr. Ganley’s vision for the European Union to see how it differs from the views of the people he has spoken to since the referendum. It seems that Mr. Ganley’s vision is of a more democratic Europe; he seems to feel that the direct election of people to the European Union’s institutions by Europe’s citizens is the answer. However, there has been some vagueness about the institutions and types of election Mr. Ganley means. Europe’s citizens already directly elect Members of the European Parliament; is Mr. Ganley suggesting Commissioners should be directly elected? If so, he is probably already aware that the Commission must represent the interests of all of Europe, rather than the interests of individual member states. If Mr. Ganley is suggesting a Europe-wide election of Commissioners to the Commission it will put Ireland at a disadvantage. With a population of 4 million it would be difficult for us to compete with the electorates of large countries such as Germany, which has a population of 80 million. In that situation, how would Mr. Ganley prevent small countries like Ireland having little or no influence over the Commissioners who are eventually elected?

Does Mr. Ganley suggest there should be direct elections to the council of Ministers? At the moment Ministers directly elected in their countries represent those countries on the Council of Ministers. Does Mr. Ganley suggest there should be Europe-wide elections in this regard? If so, how would small countries like Ireland ensure their interests are represented by people who understand its citizen' concerns?

Ganley didn't address the question at all. Joe Costello of the Labour Party asked again:

The directly elected EU President Mr. Ganley proposes seems to be the opposite of what he wants. He claims he wants more democracy in the European Union and Ireland to have more influence. Ireland’s population of 4.5 million people accounts for 1% of the overall EU vote. In the case of a directly elected EU President, would that not deny Ireland a meaningful say?

Libertas' answer? Well, Ganley's crew ignored the question and latched on to easier questions. Costello also addressed the contradictory messages that different Libertas members were putting into the public discourse. He said:

I watched Mr. Ganley last night on "One to One", and I heard him say he was totally in favour of a very strong supreme court for the European Union. That seems to be totally at variance with what Ms Simons has said. Mr. Ganley wants a federalist-type European Union with a constitution, a directly elected president and a strong supreme court, but Ms Simons is saying that the problem with the European Court of Justice is that it is too strong and it might interfere with matters. Any of the measures in the Charter of Fundamental Rights would become European law and be subject to the European Court of Justice. It seems two opposite positions have been taken.

Eventually, Ganley, kind of, addressed the questions that de Burka and Costello were posing:

I do not have a huge problem with the idea of an elected President, to be chosen by member states on a weighted basis, unlike in other places in the world.

So Ganley would like to have a weighted system? Well from the above you'd think so, but this is the same man who later stated:

I stand for democracy. I stand for one woman, one man, one vote on issues at the ballot box. These votes must be heeded, listened to and carried out whether we like it.

Except of course, when Ganley disagrees. If the government had followed Ganley's advice on the Nice Treaty, it would have pronounced the Treaty dead as soon as the result of the first referendum was announced. It would not have given Ganley the opportunity to vote 'yes' for a second time.




What are we supposed to make of Ganley? It's not that he doesn't have some fair enough arguments, it's just that he continually contradicts himself. Just look at the differences between his approach to the Nice Treaty and the Lisbon Treaty.

• He never read the Nice Treaty, but supported it, apparently thinking it wasn't really necessary to do so, yet when it came to the Lisbon Treaty, he condemned others for not having read the document.
• He supported the Nice Treaty even though other countries did not get to vote on it, yet when it comes to Lisbon, it's wrong that other countries don't get to vote.
• The Nice Treaty that he supported created the situation whereby membership of the Commission would be reduced, yet he urged voters to reject the Lisbon Treaty because it would mean we would not have a commissioner.
• Ganley supported Nice in spite of the fact that it removed our veto on matters relating to 'enhanced cooperation' but asked the public to oppose Lisbon because 'enhanced cooperation' threatened our tax system when the only real change the Lisbon treaty made to matters regarding 'enhanced cooperation' was to make it slightly more difficult to achieve.
• He supported the government's approach to the defeat of the Nice Treaty referendum, but opposes the government when they use the same approach to the defeat of the Lisbon Treaty.

The strange aspect of Ganley's differing positions on Nice and Lisbon is that, unlike members of political parties, he could easily just admit that he'd changed his mind and that he was wrong in the past. After all, he is quite fond of telling us that he is not a politician. It seems that Ganley is so concerned about avoiding the euroskeptic label that he wishes to highlight his support of all other EU treaties at the expense of appearing consistent. Those concerned about his Neo-Con links and his US military contracts will probably interpret his apparent overnight conversion to euroskepticism as evidence of an alternative agenda, but it's possible that he's just as illogical and unreasonable as many of the other anti-Lisbon campaigners.




Regardless of what one thinks of Ganley, it's becoming clear that he has big plans. From the hearings, it became clear that Ganley's position on the EU wasn't that it was great and we should keep it that way as the Libertas campaign suggested, but that it wasn't what he wanted it to be and that it should be changed in fundamental ways. Libertas was not set up simply to campaign against the Lisbon Treaty in Ireland, it was set up because Ganley and his ilk have a vision for a very different Europe. That is why we see him meeting deranged euroskeptics from all sides of the political spectrum and from all sides of the continent.

It looks like the European elections are going to be very interesting indeed.