Exit Declan Ganley

In all fairness to Declan Ganley, he ran a strong campaign in North-West and did extraordinarily well for a man nobody had even heard of 18 months ago. But it was not meant to be. Late yesterday after calling a recount only to lose 3,000 of his own votes, he packed it in and went home.



The problem with Ganley was that his actions never matched his rhetoric. While Ganley professed pro-European views, Libertas ran a campaign based on disinformation and scaremongering. These were not the actions of a group of people who supported the EU but not the Lisbon Treaty. The aim of the exercise was to get a no vote and they weren't bothered too much about how they got it. In addition they were happy to play hide and seek with the Standards in Public Office Commission over their funding, and I was never really disabused of the idea that the whole enterprise was bank rolled by Ganley himself.

Libertas' conversion to an EU wide political party — to think they were originally meant to be a think-tank — appeared to be executed with a similarly abandon. Their desire to find partners across the EU led them to align themselves with a variety of fringe parties, few if any of which subscribed to Ganley's pro-EU anti-Lisbon views, and who included La Destra a group of Italian neo-fascists.

In the end, Libertas was always a one-man band and its leader's decision to retire for politics will doubtlessly make it easier to pass the second Lisbon referendum in October and will leave those opposing the Treaty to the usual suspects.