"It's called democracy, you know?"
On June 12 2008, Ireland voted against ratifying the Lisbon Treaty, the EU's blueprint for institutional reform. Among the salient moments of the campaign was the rise to political prominence of Declan Ganley, an enigmatic, self-made millionaire who professes to be passionately pro-European while attacking what he says is the undemocratic and untransparent nature of today's EU. With Ireland expected to hold a second vote on the treaty this October, Ganley has launched Libertas, which he describes as the first truly pan-European political party, to contest this June's European elections on a "No to the Lisbon Treaty" ticket. He spoke to Paul Adamson about his background, his views on Europe and his plans to shake up how the EU is run. Reproduced here is the full transcript of that conversation.
Declan Ganley in the Brussels offices of his Libertas party
Outside Ireland, at least, you’re not that well known, so why don’t you start off by describing who you are?
I would say I’m not known at all, because in what I have read, I would not recognise myself. I’m an Irishman: I’m the son of Irish immigrants who went to the UK to live because of the impoverished state of the west of Ireland at that time, in the same way that their parents had to do, generation after generation.
My family had had to temporarily emigrate for financial reasons. My grandmother, who is 97 years old, was a farm labourer in Scotland. She left the west of Ireland when she was a teenager, went to Scotland and picked potatoes. My dad set up a very small business in London in the construction industry and then moved back to Ireland to our family farm. I’m the product of the west of Ireland and I am somebody who is in awe of what Europe is, where a European civilisation comes from. And I feel very much a part of it. So I am both an Irishman and a European and I find those things not only complementary, but very much a part of each other.
To many people, your interest in European politics seems quite recent, but I know you’ve been writing about these issues at least since 2003. How far back does your active interest in European politics go?
I would say it depends on what you call Europe, but my active interest in European politics and in the shape of Europe goes back to my childhood.
Certainly at a very young age and during my teenage years I was very interested in European history. Once I finished school I went to the then Soviet Union and certainly that place made a deep impression on me. Watching Latvia gain its independence in particular – that was something that I had first-hand experience of because I was there around that time. Seeing the eviscerated soul of Russia in the form of the Soviet Union and understanding and seeing the direct consequences of what an unaccountable government can do. It did leave an impression, maybe even a scar.
And then the European project, in providing open markets and scope and opportunity, was something that I benefited greatly from as an entrepreneur. I built Broadnet [a cable TV company] across 10 countries in the European Union. I built a cable television company in Bulgaria, a forestry company in the former Soviet Union, a timber-exporting business in Latvia and several other things. Some of my businesses succeeded and some didn’t. But if Europe wasn’t there I couldn’t have done any of them.
And now do you see yourself more as a businessman or a politician?
I don’t see myself as a politician, for sure. I’m an entrepreneur – I think I always will be. But if you see something that is seriously wrong and nobody seems to be doing anything about it that’s really going to fix the problem...you may not be the best qualified for the job, you may not even be capable of doing it, but I do think there is such a thing as duty. It’s certainly something I was brought up to believe in. And I feel like I have a duty – first of all as a father to my four children, secondly as an Irishman and thirdly as a European – to stand up, and when something is wrong, to say “something’s wrong”. But not in a negative way – in a constructive way. And to say, “Look, here’s what I think we should be doing about it.”
We’ll come to details of that in a moment, but before we get there, I think one of the reasons why the No vote in Ireland was so surprising to so many people last year was because Ireland seemed to be such a spectacular success story. It had received so much money out of the EU budget and leveraged that money to become a very friendly home for inward investment. And with a low tax base – there’s been no Brussels interference in corporation tax. So do you agree that it’s rather odd that the Irish did vote No?
No, I would say that’s exactly the reason why they did. This is like sending someone through an education process, giving them all the resources and the ability to understand the world around them, the issues that face them, the challenges. Of course they’re going to be shaped by their unique experiences and freedom in Ireland and freedom of the individual. Not in a nationalistic way, but the dignity of the individual is something that’s very precious to us and always has been. It’s why we were prepared to fight the British Empire and whatever else was there in the past, and take on challenges that seemed insurmountable, yet we persevered and were successful in the end. This is not the mark of ingratitude or anything like that. What Ireland did was reflective of a mature, sensible, seriously European country who said, “There’s something wrong with this project right now, we’ve got to fix it – stop.”
And accusing us of being ungrateful is like being a family member. Let’s say there’s somebody with an alcohol problem or abuse problem in a family and somebody stands up and says “we’ve got to do something about this.” Does that mean you don’t love that person? Does that mean you don’t respect the family? No, I think it means you are the one that respects and loves that person, maybe even the most.
Nobody can say that the Irish are Eurosceptics, because they’re not. There was a Eurobarometer poll on the popularity of the EU across all of the member states, last year. The highest approval rating for Europe was Romania, and the second highest out of 27 countries was Ireland. And yet we went out and voted No. And we did it because we’re serious about Europe
I think that the point is not so much about lack of gratitude, though I know a lot of people do say that, but simply that it’s almost perverse or counter-intuitive that the Irish didn’t see the benefits themselves, the benefits of being pro-European when they voted No in the referendum.
But again – and I would say you’re guilty of it yourself – that presumes, if you take me as an example, that I do not recognise the benefits that have accrued to Ireland through European Union membership – the money, the access to markets, and so many more things. That would pre-suppose that I’m ungrateful, or that I don’t even recognise it, or that I thought the Irish people would think that somehow a No vote was the wrong thing to do for Ireland and for Europe. It wasn’t, it was the right thing to do.
Do you agree that Ireland’s standing and influence in the EU have diminished as a result of this No vote?
No I don’t. Because it depends what you mean by the EU. I mean, Europe to me is almost half a billion people across member states, and the fact that some people in Brussels who aren’t accountable to us at the ballot box are annoyed at what we have done is of no issue to me whatsoever. Or, I would suggest, to the Irish people. In Brussels they point the finger at Ireland in the same way that they did with the French and the Dutch and they say, “Oh, there’s something wrong with you, you did a bad thing.” No, the French, the Dutch and the Irish people, millions of them, have pointed the finger at this particular elite in Brussels and said, “No, there’s something wrong withyou, actually.”
I’m going to quote some of your own words back to you. In an article in 2003 you wrote: “A federal Europe is a pretty good idea, if it possessed an accountable administration with a clear European identity and position on the world stage; had vested in it not only those key disciplines that are best and most efficiently managed on a European level; embraced Europe’s diversity; and devolved as many matters as possible to Europe’s regions.” Many would say that’s exactly what the Lisbon Treaty was trying to do. Fair point?
It didn’t. If it did, I would have been out there campaigning for a Yes vote –absolutely. And I stand by what I said right then (and congratulations on reading, because so many journalists haven’t done that). The Lisbon Treaty didn’t do that; it didn’t do that at all. In fact, I would also say that if the Lisbon Treaty had done what it was supposed to do, or if the European constitution had done what it’s supposed to do, which was to meet the objectives of the Laeken declaration and move Europe closer to its citizens, I think it would have passed. I think it would have passed in France, in the Netherlands and in Ireland too.
So how would you then define your brand of European federalism, or European integration or European cooperation? What’s it about for you?
It’s about people. It’s about almost half a billion people across Europe. About making them feel like this is their project, because it is. If it’s not for them then who is it for? And if it is for them, that they need to be engaged, they have to feel a part of this. They have to have ownership; they have to be stakeholders. Their energy has to be harnessed to make Europe successful. What we actually have in Europe at the moment, in some of these institutions – and you may find this strange – is a certain mediocrity, a lack of ambition, a distrust of the public, a distrust of people, an unwillingness to engage with them and a default position which is to talk down to people, to criticise them when they ask us questions, to tell them that they’re somehow Eurosceptic.
It’s an arrogance and people find it grossly offensive. It alienates them. It turns them – and it feeds Euroscepticism, absolutely. Every day these people trot out more reasons and more examples that are fuel to Eurosceptics. And if it continues, it will destroy this project. And this project is too important to be destroyed by a few idiots.
So, as I understand it, you’re in favour of the European project as long as it is more accountable. So how would you make it more accountable?
It’s called democracy, you know? And it’s a pretty simple thing. If it takes more than a minute to explain what democracy is then it’s not democracy anymore. I was very amused, I was on some blog site a few days ago and somebody, some proponent of the Lisbon Treaty, had put together a useful diagram of how democracy worked through the Lisbon Treaty and there were so many moving parts to this diagram and input points and different processing areas and everything else. This person had convinced themselves that this had something remotely to do with the democratic process – which it doesn’t.
Democracy – okay well, I can’t do this graphically but let me take this pen as an example of my power as an individual citizen. Power devolves from the citizen. This is my power as an individual. And what I do in a democratic process to my lawmakers, for example, in Ireland, is I take my power – my little piece of it, my little opinion – and I lend it at the ballot box to a lawmaker, to an elected politician. I vote for them. And I lend it to them, I don’t give it to them. I lend it to them on condition that they use it wisely. And the most important thing about democracy is that if you don’t use properly my little bit of power that I lend you, I can take it off you and I can give it to this person over here.
Now what the Lisbon Treaty has done in countries that haven’t had a referendum is taken the power of the citizen – but that citizen has lent that power to elected politicians. And those parliaments have taken that citizen’s power and sovereignty and they’ve handed it to institutions in Brussels that the citizen can never hold accountable. It wasn’t theirs to give away in the first place, that wasn’t the deal. Now people may not be aware of this, and they’re not, but hopefully by June they will be.
But at the European Parliament elections in June people do get a chance to express their opinion by going to the ballot box.
Absolutely.
Isn’t that enough of an opportunity?
It would be, but the European Parliament is the weakest of the three institutions. I mean, you know, here in this city, to initiate laws, most laws, you have to be unelected – there’s something really wrong with that. Especially when a majority of new laws in most member states of the European Union – maybe even all of them – now originate from here. I was with the senior partner of one of the bigger law firms in the world within the last two weeks (I was giving a talk on this whole issue) and he said, “It’s very interesting, because you’re right.” Their law firm (and they’ll remain unnamed) like Brussels best for doing business, for lobbying, because, he said, “We just write the legislation that we want for our clients and we walk it through.”
Why would you ever lobby somebody in Berlin or Paris or Dublin or London when you can get laws passed through here. And when they land on the desk of the Irish parliament (if you take 2006, which is the year we have the figures for, 407 laws that year passed in the Irish parliament came from Brussels), the average amount of time that each one of those was considered for was 26 seconds. If you take Sweden as an example, these hundreds of pages arrive on a Thursday afternoon and they’re all ratified by the Swedish parliament by mid-Friday afternoon. No one’s reading this stuff.
I don’t want this to become a tutorial in European politics. There is a lot of legislation coming out of Brussels you say, but the European Commission more often than not proposes legislation at the direct request of both the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers. And when legislation is finally adopted, it is adopted by MEPs, who are elected every five years, and by member state ministers who are elected at the national level, so there is democratic scrutiny.
Well, there is – but it’s not working. And the European Parliament should not be the weakest of the three institutions here if we’re really serious about a democracy. There are other things in the Lisbon Treaty, for example, the president of the European Council. And you know, you can almost see Nicolas Sarkozy – he’s probably having dreams of being in that position as he jets around the world, enjoying representing almost half a billion people. I didn’t get to vote for him, I didn’t get to vote against him, neither did anybody else, so as a citizen I find that offensive. I don’t want somebody speaking for me on a global stage unless they’ve had the decency to provide me and everybody else with a manifesto, debated with other potential candidates and given me a choice. And have let me go to the ballot box and delegate my authority to them as one individual little citizen – or not. That’s democracy. And if we can’t do that then let’s not have that position.
Let’s move on then. You talk a lot about the lack of transparency in the EU but you know you’re often criticised for not being transparent yourself in how your activities are financed. Why don’t you just once and for all give a clear answer on that if only to avoid the irritation of constantly being asked the question?
But we have given a clear answer on it and we have complied with all of the rules and regulations. We said we raised every penny that we used in the campaign in Ireland from Irish citizens. And we said how much money we spent, which was in the region of €800,000.
That is vastly more information than the Yes side has released – and yet, you’re asking me that question and you have never asked any of them. What more can I do? I didn’t set the rules for disclosures of campaign funding in Ireland. I followed the same rules as everybody else. The fact that the Yes side has been far more opaque in their disclosures, there’s nothing I can really do about that.
Your campaign last year claimed a number of things about the Lisbon Treaty, including that it would impose abortion in Ireland.
No it didn’t. Quote me – you’ve stated something as a fact. The media, particularly in Europe has said that and it’s not true. We never said that.
So you deny that. Let me just finish this list then you can react to them one by one. So you say…
I think it’s even unfair to ask the question because, you know, I didn’t beat my wife either. Do you want me to say no to that?
What about the idea that it could lead to conscription to a European army?
I never said that that was an issue.
And to the imposition of the death penalty?
That we did say, in response to a question. But we certainly didn’t make it a campaign issue. This was on a TV programme or a radio interview or something and we did say there was a provision that in the case of risk of war or conflict (I can’t remember the exact article provision now) there was an ability for the death penalty to be re-introduced by a member state – which there is, but we didn’t make that in issue.
One final thing: is it true that your campaign said that the Charter of Fundamental Rights would introduce detention of three-year-olds for educational purposes?
What we said was – and again, that was in response to a question – we did say that there were (and we can get the article numbers and I can come back and give them to you), a set of specific articles that did deal with the issue of minors and the handling of minors under certain circumstances. But, of course, that was taken out of context and blown up into something. Again, it wasn’t an issue in any of the literature, in any of the speeches, any of the engagement that we did out in the streets with people. That was never an issue that was brought up.
You’re clearly against a second referendum in Ireland but there obviously will be one later on this year...
I don’t think that’s obvious.
Really?
Yes. Again, I think this crowd here have convinced themselves that it is. I think you have to listen very carefully at what people on all sides have been saying.
So you think there’s a quite distinct possibility that there might not be a second one?
I think that there is a distinct possibility that there will be one but I don’t think it’s obvious.
OK. What is the latest on your activities for the European elections and assembling this pan-European party list? How many candidates do you have and in how many countries are you fielding candidates?
We’re not ready to announce how many candidates we have but we hope it will be a significant number of high calibre individuals who are prepared to go out and take a stand and give people the opportunity to have their referendum on the anti-democratic Brussels of the Lisbon Treaty or a Europe that is democratic, accountable and transparent and is confident in its own future; a Europe that can stand up and have the ambition and courage to lead the world. And that’s going to be our message. We’re entering into very difficult times. Opportunists, scaremongers will try to get people to give away more of their freedom, more of their individual rights to people who are unaccountable to them at a ballot box. Libertas will be going out to the world with a very different message saying that European economic recovery and leadership is going to come from individuals – it’s going to come from the people. And that only when they get engaged with the European project and make it their project and allow it to belong to all of us across Europe is this thing going to really succeed – and is its potential going to be available to be exploited by the people, which is who this thing is supposed to be for.
You used the word “scaremonger”, but you must know that that’s precisely what people say about you and your campaign.
I know, but it’s not true. It’s a lie. They can call me a Eurosceptic and they can say all of these things. They can and do lie. They can attack us, they can call us names, they can make outrageous accusations with regard to what our motivations are – that we are not really Europeans, that we’re representing the interests of others and these types of things, but it’s not going to stop us from telling the truth.
So if you win seats in the European elections in June, what’s your plan? Will you form a group, or sit as independents?
No, it will be the first genuine pan-European political party, with party members, hopefully, sitting together in a Libertas party in the European Parliament with an agenda to bring democracy, accountability and transparency to the organs of European governance in a pro-European and constructive way. And to go out there and engage with the citizens, get people involved and have them know that they are represented, that Europe is theirs, it cares about them – and it is their opportunity to improve their lives, and the opportunities and the lives of their children and future generations.
And do you intend to lead this group in the European Parliament if you stand for election?
If I stand for election, yes I would.
You keep saying again and again that you’re passionately pro-European, but are you concerned at least about being judged by the company you keep, the people you share platforms with, the people who are much more clearly and unambiguously anti-European.
I don’t think that...people who are much more clearly and unambiguously anti-European would suggest that I am somehow anti-European, which I’m not. And it does get tiresome to keep saying that, but if anybody can point me to a single thing that I have said that is anti-European or even Eurosceptic, or that I have ever written anything that is anti-European or Eurosceptic, then I’d like to be able to correct the record because I never have, because it’s not what I am.
But in terms of, as you said, the company I keep, I presume that you mean, for example, [Czech] President Klaus paying a visit to us on his state visit to Ireland. I may not agree with President Klaus on a lot of things, and frankly I’ve never had that discussion with him, in terms of all of the things that we possibly don’t agree on. But what I do agree with him on is, as far as I can tell, this is a man who, whatever his views are on other issues, feels that democracy is something that is precious and important. And I don’t know what your political beliefs are, but if you share that view with me – and you are a democrat and democracy is something that you think should be at the heart of whatever happens at Europe, and that anything that comes or is derived from the Union, decisions that are made here – that should be the people’s decision, then we’ve got something really significant that we agree on. I don’t have to agree with you on anything else, but if you agree with me on that, then we’ve got grounds.
And I’ll say this, the tendency here is to say, if you’re not for us, you’re against us, and it’s very much – it’s just like Bush said, “if you’re not for us, you’re against us”. This is the exact same message that we’re getting out here: we’ve got all of these George Bush clones in terms of their mentality of “If you’re not for us you’re against us.” And anybody that raises a question – it’s like that Monty Python sketch where they keep turning around and saying “Witch! Witch! Witch!” So nobody wants to say anything, nobody wants to ask the question because they don’t want to get called a witch. And the fact is that many so-called Eurosceptics, I think, are not all Eurosceptics. I think they fit into a multitude of categories. And I think that many of them have been forced into this position by a compounding effect – one thing after another. And I think that at least a branch of what is called Euroscepticism – at least some of those people – if Europe was properly democratic and accountable, I think that they would be on side. I think that they could be brought back on side.
Well you mentioned your meeting with President Klaus during his state visit, what kind of things did you talk about? It is significant, isn’t it, that you met with each other during his visit?
It is significant. It was a mark of respect. We talked about the campaign in Ireland and it was a mark of respect that he showed for the majority of the Irish people who made a very clear decision in spite of all the interpretations that the people here have attempted to put on it. The Irish people made a very clear and informed decision in very large numbers and he came to represent and recognise that voice – the voice of the majority of Irish people: decent, well-informed people who went out and exercised their democratic right. And the fact that he was berated for that, that the political elites in Brussels and the political elites in Dublin who were isolated by this democratic decision by the Irish people, by the French people, by the Dutch people – the fact that that gets under their skin is of no consequence or concern to me. I don’t claim that the Irish people voted No because of me. They certainly didn’t – they voted No because they believed that that was the right thing to do. But I’m part of the majority, and I’d like to remind everybody in this city of that fact.
Last question. You say it’s tiresome, and tiring, to have to re-establish and re-iterate your European credentials but there do seem to be two Declan Ganleys. One, the moderate, reasonable, sensible guy who says again and again, “I am passionately pro-European, I believe in Europe for all sorts of reasons, both personal and professional.” And yet there’s the other Declan Ganley who goes on platforms and rails against everything “bad” coming out of Brussels and how the whole things needs to be totally reformed.
Are you not allowed to point those things out? For those people who criticised the Bush administration for their mistakes and failings, were they anti-American? I’d ask your readers that. Were they anti-American? Because if we cannot, as pro-Europeans, stand up like grown-ups and criticise what’s wrong with our system in a constructive way, in a pro-European way, if that makes us anti-European in the same way that people who had problems with the Bush administration might have been accused of being anti-American, then you know what? I don’t know where I live anymore.
But at least to many people there is a genuine confusion and they find it hard to understand where you’re coming from.
No, it’s stunning because you know, the majority of the Irish people did understand and I know from travelling around Europe (I’ve just come back from Stockholm this morning), I absolutely and sincerely believe that ours is the view of the majority of decent Europeans out there. They’re not against the European Union, they want it to succeed, they want it to be strong. They’d love Europe to be dynamic and be able to lead the world but they recognise that with all of the things that are currently wrong in this town, we’re not going to get there, we have to fix them. And that sometimes you’ve got to stand up.
Look, it shouldn’t be me. I’m a nobody, the son of farmers from the west of Ireland. Why does it take a nobody like me to come in here and point these things out? There are plenty of people in this town who should be doing the same thing from a pro-European perspective in the way that I have, who wouldn’t have the same ladder to climb in terms of getting heard or having these issues considered.
This place has become myopic, it has become blinkered, it has become single-minded, to the point where – I would agree with you – where people cannot even compute what it is that I’m saying in this town. But yet you go out of this town and people get it – everywhere across Europe.
January 21 2009
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