EUROPEAN DIARY:Anti-Ganley hysteria has been sweeping through the corridors of power in Brussels, writes Jamie Smyth
IT WAS an extraordinary week at the European Parliament. MEPs held their second successive plenary session at their Brussels home rather than in Strasbourg, where the roof had collapsed because of a design fault in the famous hemicycle debating chamber.
Masonry and rubble fell on scores of seats in the chamber and, according to a report into the incident, several British Tory MEPs and Fine Gael's Gay Mitchell could have been crushed had the accident happened during a plenary debate.
Even the Socialists would not wish this on their centre-right opponents. But judging from the ferocity of the attacks MEPs dished out last week to Libertas founder Declan Ganley, some clearly want to remove him from EU politics permanently.
Co-president of the Greens Daniel Cohn-Bendit used the order-of-business session at the opening of the plenary to repeat allegations that Libertas may have benefited from funding from US agencies such as the CIA or the Pentagon. And, in an unusual move, the normally conservative European Parliament president Hans-Gert Pöttering called on the political groups to consider setting up a committee of inquiry.
The following day, the European Commission weighed into Libertas when the official spokesman of commission president José Manuel Barroso accused Ganley's organisation of double standards. "It ought not to be too much for those who ask transparency from others to be transparent themselves," he said at the daily briefing for EU journalists.
With all the anti-Ganley rhetoric in the air, it was no surprise to meet Minister for European Affairs Dick Roche in the European Parliament last Tuesday. The pugnacious Wicklow TD has declared all-out war on Libertas since the referendum defeat in June, and enlisting pro-European forces to help combat Ganley seems the natural thing to do given Libertas may relaunch as a pan-European group to fight next year's June elections.
But the anti-Ganley hysteria could play into the hands of the media-savvy businessman by allowing him to claim that he has become the target of a pan-European witch-hunt.
There was also a certain irony in the parliament's president Pöttering calling for transparency from Libertas when MEPs still refuse to provide a full and detailed account of their own expenses.
On Thursday the conference of presidents - attended by all the political group leaders - decided to ask the US Congress for help in investigating Ganley.
Liberal leader Graham Watson justified the decision by saying, rather dramatically, that Congress had proved useful in helping to track down the source of IRA financing during the Troubles.
Perhaps, but Ganley has not threatened to blow up the Strasbourg parliament, a move some MEPs might actually support to relieve them of the monthly commute.
It is also rather ludicrous to expect Congress to investigate Ganley at a time when it faces the collapse of the US financial system.
Those who allege that the CIA or Pentagon funnelled money into Libertas to undermine the EU fail to square this with the fact that Washington has been trying to persuade the union to boost its foreign and military presence for years.
Jonathan Evans, a British Tory MEP who chairs the European Parliament's committee on US relations, confided on Friday that he was at a loss to understand the conference of presidents' request to Congress. "Do you Irish not have an appropriate body to investigate the funding issue?" he asked. "You know Congress is quite busy right now."
Evans is right: investigating the funding of Libertas should be an Irish responsibility.
To his credit, Fianna Fáil MEP Brian Crowley, who attends the conference of presidents as leader of the Union for Europe of the Nations (UEN) group, told his colleagues that the Standards in Public Office Commission was the appropriate body to undertake any investigation.
But it seems that Libertas's plan to launch anti-Lisbon candidates across Europe for next June's European elections has spooked pro-European MEPs into making a pre-emptive strike.
As The Irish Times has reported over the past few months, Ganley has questions to answer over the way the Libertas campaign was funded.
But MEPs would be better served challenging his ideas and Libertas's vision for Europe, and leaving the investigation of his finances to the commission.
It is not as if they don't have enough ammunition. Ganley ran a smart referendum campaign by providing a simple, if not always coherent or truthful, message to voters about Lisbon. But he has so far failed to articulate any viable alternative to the Lisbon Treaty or a coherent vision of his own ideology.
At a recent meeting in Brussels, he said he was deeply committed to the EU, yet he has spent the past few months consorting with Eurosceptics such as Czech president Vaclav Klaus. He says he favours the federalist dream of a directly elected EU president, yet rails against European regulation. He wants Georgia to join Nato, so should Ireland join up also?
Surely there is enough meat on the bone here to keep the parliament's misguided MEPs occupied.