Declan Ganley: 'Leo Varadkar is a disappointment'

If Declan Ganley is so rich, I growl to myself, then why can't he build a proper driveway? I'm struggling up the crater-strewn lane that Google Maps has convinced me to follow Moyne Park, his stately pile on 40 acres near Tuam, Co Galway.

Axle still intact, I slot my jalopy between the few hundred grands’ worth of Range Rovers facing the lake outside the house. Huge fins rise up out of the water. A Tricolour flutters nearby that wouldn’t look out of place atop Áras an Uachtaráin. If his front garden is anything to go by, Ganley is richer than Croesus.

The businessman and political campaigner has agreed to meet primarily to discuss his Rivada Networks technology company, which is reinventing the use of radio spectrum. Ganley being Ganley, he'll talk about more.

Although he talks a lot, what does he ever really say? He displays passion and, undeniably, a seam of intellectual heft. But conversations with him can elicit more questions than answers. Ganley seems to revel in his mystery-man notoriety.

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His wife, Delia, opens the door, holding back a slobber-happy chocolate Labrador called Tootsie.

When Ganley strides into the reception room of the magnificent period home, one thing becomes quickly apparent – whatever else he is or is not, he is a born host.

“Aha! You’ve met Tootsie,” he booms. The dog is an outrageous flirt, lolling on her back on a Persian rug. Does she have the run of the whole house? Everywhere except my bed, laughs Ganley.

Born in Watford to Irish parents who moved back home to Galway when he was 13, Ganley isn’t 50 until the summer. But he seems to have been around forever, doing deals across Europe since the early 1990s.

Bandwidth is the world's next great commodity. It is the core natural and economic resource for the next few hundred years, like salt or coal were in the past

Aside from his profile as a businessman and anti-abortion campaigner, he is best known as the bête noire of the political establishment who sunk the first Lisbon Treaty a decade ago with his Libertas group.

His first love is military history, however. Sitting in his library, Ganley reveals he is writing a book: “It’s called Not My King. It’s about the Jacobite influence on the American Revolution. I think that important piece of the story is downplayed. I’ll probably be dead before I finish it.”

Ganley riffs impressively on US history and then on his estate, which was once a seminary and has its own chapel on the grounds. He is fascinated by the past. But Rivada, he believes, is the future. What is its big idea?

“Bandwidth is the world’s next great commodity. It is the core natural and economic resource for the next few hundred years, like salt or coal were in the past. We must democratise access to it. We must not let it be controlled by feudal lords [mobile phone companies].”

Ganley thinks state mobile spectrum auctions are insane. Rivada has invented technology to build an open-access wireless market. He envisages a future where all sorts of companies – big and small, and not just mobile operators – can directly jump on and off spectrum, using it to send data and sell services.

Spectrum auctions

“Spectrum auctions are dumb. It’s like telling people you can only buy property in two-million-hectare lots, but anybody can bid. Only three guys would show up for that auction. Why aren’t we selling bandwidth to wholesale customers on a time, space and capacity basis?”

Rivada has 141 patents for technology to facilitate easy access. For example, it has patents that would control access to spectrum at a certain height for, say, drone corridors, or to facilitate cheaper access to underutilised spectrum in the middle of the night. It can even corral spectrum in an individual building.

It has also invented a system to allow spectrum blocked off for emergency services to be used by the regular economy during down-time. This is its real economic potential. In an emergency, Rivada’s kit would kick everybody else off – “ruthless pre-emption”.

I was in a hotel in Texas recently with Martin [O'Malley]. Some guys from AT&T tried to get us kicked out. We got right in their face

Rivada targets business globally, but any upcoming 5G spectrum release in the US would really grab its attention. It has about 70 staff and Ganley says it has spent about $100 million (€81 million) on its technology. Rivada has a heavyweight board, including former US presidential candidate Jeb Bush and former Maryland governor Martin O'Malley, as well as former Wall Street bankers and the former heads of the US and UK defence forces.

Its finances are opaque. Rivada’s Irish subsidiary has a deficit of €1 million, and there are no public figures for its US hub. It sounds like a start-up, but it has been picking up US defence communications contracts for over a decade. Websites that list US state contracts show at least $160 million of tenders won by Rivada joint ventures in recent years.

Ganley says the company's last fundraising valued it at $700 million, but insists it could be worth "€10 billion" if it wins a big State contract. He owns "just under 50 per cent", he says, although accounts of the Irish arm state he personally owns 24 per cent of its "ultimate parent". Perhaps he controls other tranches. Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel is among the shareholders, he confirms.

Ganley is convinced big telcos are worried by his vision. He punctuates all of his stories with belly laughs, but one has him doubled up: “I was in a hotel in Texas recently with Martin [O’Malley]. Some guys from AT&T tried to get us kicked out. We got right in their face. Martin said ‘I’ve been kicked out of better places than this.’ In the evening, this AT&T guy came up to me. He actually gave me a hug. He said ‘we know you’re right, that this [open access] is where it is going’.”

Rivada recently lost out to AT&T for a huge US emergency services contract, Firstnet, and last year it lost a two-horse race for a $7 billion wholesale tender in Mexico which Ganley alleges was "rigged". He gets down on his hands and knees in the library to demonstrate how his bid boxes were "hijacked" at gunpoint in Mexico city.

He says he knew his rivals in Mexico were watching. Rivada bought its own glossy printing equipment for a one-off run to produce the bid in its office, rather than trust a local printer. His brother Seán slept in the doorway overnight to protect the paperwork. Rivada has launched two lawsuits over the tender.

Such intrigue feeds the whiff of enigma that has long surrounded Ganley – where did he make his cash and how? He makes little effort to dispel it. Perhaps the veneer of mystery serves a purpose as a calculated barrier, an outer film to protect him from the scrutiny and pressure of rivals in business and politics.

He “always had that commercial thing”, he says, even as a teenager at school in Galway, where he traded shares, sold turf and rented out hand-held space invader games to other boys. He craved a career in business and eschewed college: “I knew the people who had college training would always be available for hire.”

Enjoying himself now, Ganley lights a fat cigar as he tells his background story. He moved back to London after school and worked as a steel fixer and barman. He wanted to wear a suit, so got a job “making tea” in an insurance broker.

After the Challenger space shuttle blew up in 1986, he pitched his bosses an idea to insure western cargo on Soviet rocket ships. Aged 19, they told him to research it.

“I went to the Google of 1987. It was called the Yellow Pages. I went to S for Soviet and rang the embassy.”

Eventually, he reached the trade delegation in London, which was “KGB central, but I didn’t know it at the time”. The insurance idea didn’t work, but his trade contacts later asked him to organise other commercial deals.

“They wanted architects and this and that. Next thing, I have this shopping list. I said ‘yeah, I can get you these’. My answer was always ‘yes – what’s the question?’”

He travelled to Moscow and made more contacts as the USSR was nearing collapse. Soon, he says he was doing lucrative deals to export aluminium, the first time he “made a few quid”.

He set up an office above a car spray shop in London, and raised cash from rich bankers in New York to fund privatisation deals in Russia. He set up a timber exporting business. He raised finance to buy a forest "the size of Belgium" to feed 28 privatised sawmills. He grins as he tells this amazing story.

Licence deals

By 1995, he had made enough money to buy Moyne Park. The rumour is he paid cash. The 1990s and early 2000s remained good to him. Deals kept flowing. He sold his forestry business for millions. He did cable deals in Bulgaria, bond voucher deals in Albania, and, via Broadnet, fixed-line licence deals in 10 European countries.

Comcast later bought him out of Broadnet, earning him a fortune. Infamously, a group he assembled lost out to Denis O’Brien’s Esat consortium for Ireland’s second mobile phone licence.

The Moriarty tribunal later found that Michael Lowry "delivered" the licence for O'Brien, with whom Ganley is locked in various legal disputes to this day. Just last week, O'Brien got Ganley joined as a co-defendant in a conspiracy defamation case against PR firm Red Flag, whom O'Brien alleges was working for Ganley. The Galway businessman denies this claim.

Red Flag, O’Brien alleges, was involved in a 2015 conspiracy to damage him in the run-up to a planned flotation of Digicel. His claim that Ganley is the client is based on testimony from former TD Colm Keaveney, who has sworn that he believes it to be the case. Red Flag is chaired by O’Brien’s old Independent News and Media adversary, Gavin O’Reilly, and run by Karl Brophy, who worked for O’Reilly when the businessman fell out with O’Brien at INM before leaving the media group in 2012.

During the dot.com crash, he lost, he says, €9m of his own cash on an online jewellery retailer

The case aside, Ganley claims he has no personal dispute with O’Brien, and only ever bumped into him once, “donkeys years ago” at the Monaco Grand Prix with their respective Dads.

“We’ve had the Moriarty tribunal and everything else. There are causes and there are consequences. It is important that consequences are seen to take place. Ireland is a serious country, where people have had enough of that shite.”

During the dot.com crash he lost, he says, €9 million of his own cash on an online jewellery retailer, Adornis. He says he "bottled it" and laments his failure to keep backing it as his "greatest mistake". Then came a failed bid for a mobile licence in Iraq.

Political activism

It was while researching an idea to build a pan-European energy and fertiliser group – it fell at the first hurdle when he lost out on buying Irish Fertiliser – that he began studying the then-proposed EU constitution, later rehashed as the Lisbon Treaty. His mood darkens considerably at the recollection of what he saw as a Brussels power grab without democratic oversight.

“You couldn’t get a bigger fanboy for the European project than me. Here was the script for its destruction. These f*ckers . . . I thought this was all wrong.”

He realised Ireland would get a vote on Lisbon, and resorted to stopping the whole thing by killing the treaty here: “ I thought – here I am and I’m in the Pass of freakin’ Thermopylae!”

Through Libertas, he briefly threatened to set up a pan-European political force, though that later fizzled out. His passion on the subject is undimmed.

Is [abortion] the best answer society has for women? It is nobody's right. It's not an organ being taken out. It is another life

A committed Catholic, Ganley's latest entry into the public fray is the upcoming abortion referendum. He is one of the highest-profile campaigners on the No side. He is driven by the suggestion of a US doctor to his wife, when she was pregnant with their second daughter, to consider an abortion due to scan anomalies. Clementine is now in her first year of university.

“Is [abortion] the best answer society has for women? It is nobody’s right. It’s not an organ being taken out. It is another life.”

Although he maintains something of a transatlantic lifestyle, Ireland – for all the faults he can list – is home. Is Ireland a good place to be a businessman?

“No. The tax system is immoral. But it is a good place to be a dad and husband, which is more important. To have your children grow up with first cousins around them like siblings. To be there for each other and to know what love is.”

After five hours of entertaining chat, it’s time to go. Ganley roars with laughter as he tells me I came up the wrong driveway. And the mysterious fins, he explains, are brown trout that have grown huge in the absence of predators. He throws three slices of bread into the water, which is soon alive with thrashing.

Money doesn’t matter to him, he argues as we part. I reply that he can afford to say that. He only grins when asked how much he is worth.

“I’m just a steel fixer who has done well. But if I was broke tomorrow, I’d still get up in the morning and go out. The mission continues. I’m not afraid.”

CV
Name: Declan Ganley
Age: 49
Position: Founder, chairman and chief executive of Rivada Networks
Home: Derreen, near Tuam in Galway
Family: Married to Delia with two sons and two daughters
Something that might surprise: A teetotaller, he bought his local pub, which he plans to rename the Edmund Burke
Something we would expect: The combative businessman's redevelopment plan for the pub is mired in a planning battle

In his own words: Declan Ganley on . . .

Leo Varadkar I thought he had the right stuff, that he was more of a risk-taker. I've been disappointed.

Denis O'Brien I've never had personal animus for him. I don't carry grudges because they're too heavy.

Fighting the Lisbon Treaty People tried to say I was a tool of all sorts of spooks and secret services. It's just b*llocks.

The abortion referendum We [the retain side] are going to win. There is no nobler cause. The abuse I get for it is a badge of honour.

Ireland's tax system We have a hostile environment for entrepreneurs. If I followed my tax advice, I would be domiciled elsewhere.

Brexit I want the European Union to work and I want the Brits in. Maybe we can get them back into a radically reformed EU.

Religion I was brought up in a traditional Irish Catholic family, praying the rosary every night. That makes an impression when you're eight years old.