Minister claims Libertas spent €3m on Lisbon no campaign

EUROPE Minister Dick Roche has claimed Libertas spent up to €3 million on its campaign opposing the Lisbon treaty in the run-up to last month’s referendum.

Mr Roche is calling on the group and its chairman Declan Ganley to “come clean” about how much it spent on their campaign and where the funding came from.

It has emerged that Libertas paid €912,753 on commercial advertising in places such as newspapers, bill boards and buses. The figure came from the Institution of Advertising Practitioners in Ireland.

Mr Roche said this represents a far greater figure than what Libertas claimed to have spent and raised questions about its honesty.

The minister said Libertas gave out 35,000 copies of a book by eurosceptic Jens Peter Bonde, which cost €20 each. He said the group put up more than 20,000 posters and based on the €15 that Fianna Fáil pay per poster, this would cost Libertas €300,000.

Mr Roche also added in the cost of a campaign bus and leaflets distributed by Libertas and came up with a figure between €2.5m and €3m.

Foreign Affairs Minister Micheál Martin has meanwhile defended the campaign by his party Fianna Fáil, which spent €114,814 on commercial advertising, significantly less than Fine Gael’s €485,944 and Labour’s €133,757. Mr Martin said: “The bottom line is that two-thirds of Fianna Fáil voters voted yes... just 50% of the Fine Gael support base voted yes.”

He said Fianna Fáil focused its spending on other areas such as leaflets and poll posters. “Since the last general election and in the last general election Fianna Fáil would have spent substantially less than Fine Gael on paid commercial advertising and remember this is just one form of electoral spending

“We would have had a national leaflet drop, that means we insisted or insured that every household would receive the Fianna Fáil leaflet during the referendum campaign. We also organised a national bus tour so we put our resources, around €700,000, into those aspects of the campaign,” said Mr Martin. The minister said the spending by Libertas “was an extraordinary sum of money by one entity and one man”.

Labour’s Europe spokesman Joe Costello said there is a need for more scrutiny of election and referendum spending.

“Mr Ganley refused to reveal the sources of finance for his campaign. At the same time, each of the political parties must reveal their sources,” he said.