Libertas undecided over fielding MEP candidates

LIBERTAS leader Declan Ganley said he would need 30 MEPs in the European Parliament to make an impact, but refused to say if he would field candidates in next June’s elections.

Around 20 — mostly eurosceptic members — of the Parliament’s 785 MEPs turned up to hear Mr Ganley in Brussels yesterday, where he was billed as the leader of Ireland’s successful anti-Lisbon campaign.

They included xenophobics from Jean Marie Le Pen’s national front, the Belgian anti-immigration party Vlaams Belang, the right-wing Polish party The League of Polish Families, and British MEPs including United Kingdom Independent Party (UKIP) MEP Godfrey Bloom who said women should be confined to the kitchen. It was hosted by Tory Dan Hannan, expelled from the European People’s Party for likening the German president of the Parliament to a Nazi.

Mr Ganley would not say where the estimated €912,000 funding for his anti-treaty campaign came from or confirm how much he had spent. He pointed out the regulations did not require him to do so but said it had not come from outside Europe.

Currently his group, Libertas, is fact-finding and fundraising in preparation for the elections to the European parliament next year, but he would not decide until January whether to field candidates or not.

He would talk to individuals rather than groups across Europe in terms of resources and whether or not there was a need for Libertas to run candidates.

“You could be effective in here with 30 people. You would be a lot more effective with a lot more people. The question is do you want to do that at all,” he said.

He was not sure if he would be a candidate himself and said he would find it difficult to run. “I would be reluctant to,” he said, adding “I do not feel like a politician, but I don’t know what politicians feel like.”

The decision on fielding candidates would depend on whether the government decided to ignore the result of the first referendum on the Lisbon treaty and hold a second vote, and he also wants a vote in all the other member states.

The London-born businessman who lives in Roscommon described himself as being pro-EU but wanted a different type of union from that outlined in the Lisbon treaty.

“People here must accept the decision of the voters – they do not want this formula, and not at this time”, he said adding that he favoured a simple document 25-pages long, setting out the aims of the union and on which every country would vote.

He believed the treaty held the seeds of the EU’s destruction and if politicians bring it into force the public would use the withdrawal clause in it, and insist their countries leave the union.