42 Declan Ganley

It was late 2007 when Libertas first began to be mentioned. It all seemed very odd. People had been used to all kinds of stray elements, usually from the far left or right, becoming involved in EU debates, but the idea of a wealthy businessman doing so was odd in the extreme. Why would someone like Declan Ganley want to pull down a European treaty? What sort of businessman could afford to take time off from his business to do for nothing the kind of stuff politicians were paid to do? There were all kinds of rumours about Ganley’s connections to all kinds of interests and operators, but nothing ever emerged to definitively answer the question.

Back in 1972, 211,891 Irish people (17 per cent of the population) had voted against joining the ‘Common Market’. Many of these people believed membership would lead to the destruction of the Irish farming and fishing industries, and make us the paupers of Europe. They insisted that the required trade-offs – especially the exchange of sovereignty and natural resources for infrastructure – would erode our long-term capacity for self-sufficiency. Over the years, these arguments continued to be canvassed, but were treated with increasing scepticism and impatience as Ireland began to experience the benefits of European partnership.

Whether we agreed with it or not, the decision to join the Common Market seemed to have set us on a path that could not be retraced. With ratification of the Maastricht Treaty, in 1992, we seemed to cross over into a new idea of Ireland, accepting a different relationship with the rest of Europe. With that treaty, the EU ceased to be merely a co-operative community, acquiring many of the characteristics of a single political entity. It might have been assumed that, in voting Yes to Maastricht, the Irish electorate was aware of the choice it was making. It seemed obvious that the argument for an independent Ireland had been lost. It also seemed obvious that our pursuit of a particular approach to economic development had left us no longer in a position to be choosers. Ireland had become so dependent on the relationship with the community that, henceforth, almost everything that concerned our future would have to be pursued from an acceptance of this dependence.

In 2008, when the Lisbon Treaty came up for ratification, the indigenous economy was largely secondary to a kind of cuckoo-in-the-nest multinational economy operating on the spoils of Ireland as a trade-off for employment. The national economic strategy, such as it was, depended mainly on outsiders coming in and creating activity from which we gained temporary benefits. The economic model we had chosen depended on our being part of the European Union. Nobody among our political class offered any vision by which we might proceed outside the EU or in a reduced role within it. We might smugly declare that we were ‘all Europeans now’, but we had no interest in anything but the dosh.

But an element of cussedness had crept into the electoral mindset during the Tiger years. Perhaps arising from cockiness or relative dissatisfaction with how the spoils of prosperity were dividing up, the sentiment of the average citizen appeared to lurch occasionally towards a kind of neurosis. This may have been one of the legacies of a decade of revelations about the financial improprieties of members of the political class. Suspicion and paranoia ruled, but there was also something even more fundamental, bordering on a visceral dislike of the political animal, and anyone who could stoke the fires of suspicion – as Declan Ganley and Libertas managed to do – had a good chance of giving the political establishment a run for its money.

This new sentiment was not confined to radicals or young people or any of the other standard disgruntled constituencies. It was to be found in all elements of Irish society – for example, in people who a generation before were part of what appeared to be an overwhelming moral majority in favour of Ireland’s participation in the European project. The 2008 referendum, for example, was dominated by the emergence of a band of media commentators opposed to Lisbon who, in every previous referendum, had been unquestioning cheerleaders for the political class.

Opposition to Lisbon was not, we were assured, directed at the European Union per se, but only to particular aspects, although nobody seemed sure which ones. There were vague fears about increasing bureaucratic encroachment and the loss of autonomy in legal and fiscal affairs, but the most effective slogan of the campaign was ‘If you don’t know, vote no’. Many of those who voted against the treaty subsequently admitted they did so because they did not understand it. Others referred to alleged provisions in the text with implications for Irish neutrality, taxation or abortion, which had no more validity than in any of the previous referendums concerning aspects of EU membership. The plain truth – that the Lisbon Treaty was simply a series of complicated but anodyne technical measures, a nut-tightening exercise following recent expansions – was not believed by large numbers of people.

After it was all over, there was no sense of exhilaration or achievement, other than among a tiny proportion of activists of the extreme left and right. It is as though we found ourselves in the moment of realization after a heated but meaningless row, when the parties look into each other’s eyes with a feeling of embarrassment and dawning awareness. There was a sense that the frenzy of the moment had taken things too far, and now we had to sweep up the broken crockery. A survey conducted by the European Commission immediately after the vote revealed that many people who did not understand the treaty voted No; that the overwhelming majority of women voted No; that young people voted No by a margin of two to one; and that immigration (i.e. xenophobic sentiment) was a significant factor. It was difficult to escape the conclusion that the Irish had voted No because of irrelevancies, or marginal issues, or, in many instances, just plain spite, pique or ignorance. There was even a feeling that many people voted No in the belief that enough people would vote Yes to absolve them of responsibility for the consequences of their empty, petulant gestures.

The outcome seemed to articulate something much darker than anything remotely to do with the treaty, a kind of fury with no precise centre. It is as though Lisbon acted as a poultice to draw out a whole range of festering resentments, many unspecified and even publicly denied.

Declan Ganley was the main agent in this occurrence. And yet, twelve months later, in the summer of 2009, the non-ignition of Libertas was one of the most striking outcomes of the European elections. With the Lisbon issue still unresolved, and indeed with the victory chants that followed the 2008 Lisbon result still ringing in his ears, Ganley was himself defeated in the North-West constituency, and none of his fellow Libertas candidates got a look-in.

Ganley, of course, was not the kind of figure who tends to attract approval in the heartlands of Connacht; a self-made businessman with a plummy accent who had not served his time in service to the tribe. Though adept at tailoring his message to tap into the various disgruntlements that were current in a time of growing economic upheaval, he lacked any real empathy with the people he was addressing. Though possessed of a formidable array of insights into the history of Ireland’s relationship with Europe, he never succeeded in obtaining real traction for his ambitions, whatever they were.

In the end, Declan Ganley probably did more to set back any possibility of a real engagement with the deeper issues of the European project than if he had never intervened at all. For some time to come, anyone seeking to raise these issues will be immediately struck down in the public imagination as coming ‘after Ganley’ – who came, saw, was defeated and gave up. As a result, Irish Euro-scepticism faces the prospect of going down in history as a briefly flowering hubris arising from prosperity, just one more example of how we lost the run of ourselves.