Declan Ganley is discovering that the price of smiting the establishment in the Lisbon treaty referendum campaign may be more than the €200,000 loan he advanced to Libertas to fund its successful campaigning efforts.

A coalition of Euro-enthusiasts has come together, seeking to inflict an altogether higher cost upon Ganley for his cheek. They appear to want to take away his reputation by portraying him as a well-paid stooge, a Trojan horse for sinister, anti-European forces, almost certainly American.

There is far more innuendo and supposition than proof at this stage but Dick Roche, the European affairs minister, has been asked by the European parliament to “investigate” Ganley. The Inspector Clouseau of Irish politics has thrown himself into the task with characteristically ham-fisted zeal.

Ganley is being painted as a neocon loon. Even previous speeches he made about oil dependency in the Middle East — which he hasn’t tried to hide — are spun as evidence of his flakiness. Some also want to deny his Irish identity, and now US Congress has been asked to assist in the investigations.

It’s difficult to remember a more determined effort to render someone useless in future political debate, or to take retribution. Admittedly, Ganley has given some hostages to fortune. Allowing himself to be described as British on company documents until 2006 — and then claiming it was an administrative error — left him open to adverse comment. But others have done much the same for convenience or for business reasons.

It cannot be denied that Ganley was born of Irish parents, that he was schooled in Galway and that, as an adult, he has lived there for many years. He even entertained many Fianna Fail figures in his home. To attempt to deny his Irish identity is an insult to Irish people who have emigrated, and to the children of those who emigrated, especially when they came back to live in this country.

The accusations that he is an American military stooge — and the outrage at his support for the American invasion of Iraq — is amusing. Nobody should forget that this state, under Bertie Ahern’s leadership and despite widespread public opposition, facilitated the movement of American troops though Shannon airport in a highly pragmatic move to protect American investment in Ireland.

Ganley’s Rivada operation may have made a fortune supplying communications equipment to the New Orleans rescue effort but, using the same analysis, Shannon would have been bunched financially without all that American military business.

I’m sure if you dug far enough you’d find that many Irish businessmen, including some on the Yes side in the Lisbon debate, have profitable relationships with the American establishment too. Peter Sutherland, one of the most vocal proponents of Yes, is treated with a degree of reverence in polite circles in Ireland. He is not just a director of Goldman Sachs, a “blue chip” Wall Street investment bank, but is a member of the Bilderberg Commission, an organisation devoted to exactly the type of right-wing policies Ganley is being damned for supporting.

Ganley’s links with the US military establishment are intriguing, and indeed there is a further coincidence in the fact that Ulick McEvaddy was one of the few other prominent No to Lisbon campaigners and that his Omega Air outfit has profited from refuelling US Air Force craft. But Ganley has gone so far as to state that he favours an EU army — something many No to Lisbon voters do not want — so it’s hard to see how he is advancing US opposition to such a development if that is what he is supposedly being “paid” to do.

The money issue is tricky, however, especially the source of the money Libertas spent on advancing its anti-Lisbon agenda. I have pressed Ganley repeatedly about it in radio interviews and ten days ago he finally conceded on The Last Word that he had lent €200,000 to the campaign and was unable to say when and how the money would be repaid.

This raises the strong possibility that Ganley has effectively bent the rules on the size of individual donations by giving a large gift and calling it a loan, all the time stating that it will be repaid when he knows it never will. And did that money come from his American military friends?

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