LIBERTAS FOUNDER Declan Ganley has said the organisation complied “to the letter” with political funding regulations during the Lisbon Treaty campaign and that this will be proven when its accounts for the year are released.
“Our accounts for 2008 are at this moment obviously not complete, as the financial year has not ended, but those accounts, when they are published, will show this to be the case,” he said.
Mr Ganley said the €800,000 spent during the Libertas campaign against the Lisbon Treaty “pales into insignificance” when compared to the amount spent by pro-treaty campaigners.
He added that it was saddening that a section of the parliamentary class seemed “pathologically obsessed with the defeated and rejected” document.
“[It is] even more saddening that they appear to think so little of the electorate that they believe that the Irish people can be persuaded to change their minds if Libertas is somehow ‘discredited’. This was their strategy for almost the entirety of the Lisbon campaign, and it was as unsuccessful then as it will be in the future.”
He said the European elections next June would give Irish people a chance to vote again, not just on Lisbon, but on the performance of the Government and Opposition.
“Libertas played a small but not unimportant role in giving the Irish people an honest choice in 2008, and the continued attempts by the Irish and European political cartels to overturn the sovereign will of a free nation make it more and more likely that we may decide to do so again in 2009.”
