DESPITE DIFFICULTIES over registration and funding at EU level, Libertas chairman Declan Ganley has declared his intention to proceed with a campaign to win seats in next June’s European elections.
Speaking yesterday on RTÉ Radio 1's Today with Pat Kenny, he said: "One way or the other, we are coming. Libertas is going to happen to Brussels, whether they like it or not."
The failure to win recognition from the European Parliament would be overcome. “We can run candidates anyway because we are registering Libertas as a political party nationally in every member state of the EU.”
Blaming Brussels and EU leaders for the economic crisis, Mr Ganley said: “We need to make sure that we do not chain ourselves to the same set of policies which were enshrined in the Lisbon Treaty that got Europe – not just Ireland, all of Europe – into this economic mess that we’re in, and the question of the leaders that got us there is another question which people can start to answer in the June election.”
He continued: “We have an opportunity across Europe and in Ireland to absolutely reshape the global economy and lead. And there are mistakes being made in the US right now: we have an opportunity as a united Europe, as Europeans, to go out there and lead and Ireland can play a very important part in that. Chucking good money after bad into these banks is definitely not the way to go about doing it.”
Denying he was a Eurosceptic, Mr Ganley said: “Because we’re Europeans, we have trouble with the Lisbon Treaty and the fact is, and I have challenged journalists, I have said: ‘Point to anything that Libertas or I have ever said that is any way Eurosceptic’. We are exactly the opposite. I have poured scorn on Eurosceptics because scorn is what they deserve.
“But if people understand the effect of the Lisbon Treaty, not just on us in Ireland but right across Europe, they would be outraged at what is in this document and it’s amazing to see the same old people harp on with the same old tunes that they’ve been singing for well over a year now, saying that this somehow makes us more European.”
Libertas activist Caroline Simons said last night she was considering running in the European elections in Dublin. “I am thinking about it,” she said.
In a speech to be delivered tonight at Trinity College Dublin in response to former French president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, Ms Simons describes herself as “somebody seriously thinking about putting herself before the electorate”.
