Declan Ganley: Ireland's Mysterious Mr. No

Outside Dublin's Croke Park traders were selling hats, scarves and T-shirts to the thousands of fans on their way in to watch Dublin play Louth at Gaelic football. A well-dressed, well-groomed highly articulate man with an English accent was on a rather different selling mission, handing out, not sporting paraphernalia, but copies of the Lisbon Treaty on Europe's future.

The man, Declan Ganley, should be a member of Ireland's elite establishment: he is after all a millionaire, living in a mansion in Galway and owning a Rolls-Royce, a Merc and a helicopter. Yet the establishment is intensely fearful of him, because of the highly effective role he has played in persuading Irish voters to reject the Lisbon Treaty and send the European Union back to the drawing board.

They worry in Brussels too, apprehensive that an anti-Lisbon vote would deliver a huge setback to the entire European project.

While all of Ireland's major political parties are urging the electorate to turn out and support the Treaty in this Thursday's referendum, 39-year-old Mr Ganley has been at the centre of the campaign against the document.

His performance seems certain to help notch up the highest negative vote ever recorded in Ireland's periodic referendums on European issues. The latest opinion poll puts the Yes campaign only three points ahead: the No people may even win.

On the surface, Mr Ganley seemed on Sunday to have little enough in common with the fans streaming into Croke Park. Yet although vendors seemed to be selling few scarves, Mr Ganley and the other anti-Lisbon campaigners have been doing a roaring trade in pushing for a No vote.

An unscientific straw poll of fans produced a large anti-Lisbon majority. "I'm voting No," said one woman. "We had to fight for freedom and I don't like to see that thrown away."

A young man added: "I'll be voting No. I've heard the tax would go up. It would affect the money we're earning." A cheerful woman in her fifties, wearing a jester's cap in Dublin colours, said: "We won't have a proper vote in Europe if we go with the Yes vote, so we're voting No."

A middle-aged couple shook their heads: "The government is terrible, so we're voting no. The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer."

A man in his forties, wearing sunglasses, was one of the few Yes supporters: "Ireland has done very well out of Europe. I know the arguments against but they're mainly spurious, with people wanting every single axe to grind."

More representative was the young man who declared: "I just don't agree with a lot of what they're going to do. I would be generally pro-European but not on this Treaty. It's a step too far as far as I'm concerned."

Many opponents of the Treaty insist they are pro-Europe, but do not feel that voting No makes them bad Europeans. Mr Ganley repeatedly makes this point: "Ireland is a pro-European country," he said, raising his voice above the din of horns from the fans. "We want Ireland to be at the heart of Europe, but we want a democratic and accountable Europe and the Lisbon Treaty gives us the opposite."

Lisbon, he contends, is bad for the Irish economy, in particular endangering its low rate of corporation tax. It would, he says, reduce Ireland's influence and hand over much power to Brussels.

He can hardly be accused of being insular, since he has amassed his fortune with international ventures which have taken him to the US, Russia, Bulgaria and Latvia where he once worked as an adviser to the government. His English accent comes from the fact that he was born in London, though his Irish-born parents took the family back to live in rural Co Galway when he was 13.

In some ways he did not fit in, but he compensated with precocious entrepreneurial flair which emerged in his teens. After school he went from working on construction sites in London to a lowly position in an insurance company before going on to build a business career ranging from aluminium in Russia to forestry in Latvia, telecommunications in Bulgaria and jewellery on the internet. Some of his concerns have not been huge successes, while others are said to have been sold on for phenomenal sums. What is clear is that until this campaign, he was much better known in the business world than in political activity and that he has concentrated on international rather than Irish activity.

Some of his many companies do business with the US military-industrial complex – one supplies emergency response systems to the military – leading some in the Yes camp to portray him as a shadowy figure with connections to neoconservatives whose organisation is being bankrolled by sinister money from outside Ireland. One senior figure asked: "Are they getting it from the CIA, the UK Independence Party or their friends in the US military?" Certainly, his campaign movement Libertas has spent plenty of money. On Sunday, for example, he could afford to have a private plane soar over Croke Park trailing the message "Keep Europe off the pitch – vote No".

Libertas, which dismisses all such suggestions, is one of a wide range of anti-Treaty groups ranging from the far-right to the far-left. They concentrate on different areas affected by the Treaty and indeed in some cases areas which are, arguably, not affected by it at all. The key word is "arguably" since the Treaty is almost 400 pages long and so filled with legal complexities as to be unintelligible to the layperson.

The Prime Minister, Brian Cowen, admitted he had not read it "from cover to cover". Ireland's European commissioner, Charlie McCreevy, added that "only a lunatic" would try.

Mr Ganley attracted interest by saying he had gone through it, a feat which earned him the nickname "The Man Who Has Read the Treaty."

The sheer length and density of the document means that the campaign has ranged over workers' rights, a European army, Irish neutrality, discharges from Sellafield nuclear plant, abortion and euthanasia. These are reflected on the posters enlivening Dublin: "We don't want EU military expansion," proclaimed one. "Don't vote EU taxation," said another while a third urged: "People died for your freedom, vote No."

Sinn Fein is prominent in the No campaign, arguing that Lisbon gives Brussels too much power, would damage the economy, undermine neutrality and drive down salaries.

A familiar pattern has emerged in this campaign: referendum propositions generate automatic coalitions of opponents who may have very different and indeed contradictory reasons for opposing them. One Irish politician remembers the late British Labour leader John Smith saying privately that the trouble with referendums is that people often answer questions they weren't asked.

A government supporter, handing out Yes leaflets near Croke Park, complained: "The Yes campaign has a more difficult task. The No campaign can cherry-pick areas – but I have to sell the entire Treaty, as it is."

The trouble for the Yes people is that the Lisbon Treaty offers no obvious reward for supporting it, either in terms of idealism or practical benefits. And most voters seem to have concluded that there is no real penalty involved if they vote No.

A further tactical disadvantage for the Yes people is that the No campaign was much faster out of the traps, becoming active from the start of the year, long before major parties got organised. Since then almost the entire establishment – business, farmers, major trade unions, media – have lent their weight to the Yes campaign. The big political beasts like Mr Cowen are out on the streets and finally seem to be making up lost ground, though it will take a late swing to deliver a Yes victory.

But a problem lies in the standing of the political classes themselves, whose reputation has taken a severe pounding through the years of the corruption tribunals, still in session after many years of unsettling revelations.

But at a deeper level Irish opinion seems disenchanted with the European project itself. The elite is still as pro-Brussels as ever, but comments such as Mr McCreevy's have added to the familiar criticism that people at the top are becoming more complacent and condescending.

Ireland was once hugely, automatically pro-European, originally in terms of idealism and later in terms of major funding. But eaten bread is soon forgotten, and now that monies are diverted to newer EU entrants Irish Euroscepticism is rising.

This may seem ungrateful, since EU money helped create the Celtic Tiger. And, at another important level, it has greatly increased national self-respect and self-assurance.But self-assurance tends to bring a decrease in deference, as the Irish electorate is showing.

A Yes vote will allow the European project to continue. A No vote would produce the paradox that the Irish, long so pro-Europe, could hold up the entire thrust of continental development.