John McGuirk

Welcome to the blog.

For most of the past two years, my life has been professionally devoted to somebody else’s cause. The defeat of the Lisbon Treaty, to my mind, is a worthy goal, and had I not been employed to help engineer it’s defeat I would without a shadow of a doubt have been a vocal and partisan opponent of it’s passage in any case. In the end, we failed. We were always going to fail, I think. The Irish people are much more sophisticated than many people give them credit for. In the final analysis, they decided that they wanted a Commissioner, and once it was given to them they weren’t going to push their luck any further. Ironically, I think they learned their lesson from Nice One, and I’m pretty sure they’ll remember the trick for future Treaties. The Irish know how to drive a bargain, simple as. It’s a good thing, in many ways.

This blog is not going to be about Lisbon, Libertas, Caroline Simons, or Declan Ganley. Where they are relevant, sure, they’ll get a mention, but I thought that given that I’m best known to my prospective readers for my work in that space, I should get the issue out of the way straight off the bat.

Unlike some of my colleagues from Lisbon one, I remained a servant of Libertas through the European Parliament and Lisbon II campaigns. I did so partly out of conviction, and partly because there is no more interesting place to work than in the heat of a campaign – however that campaign may be going! I’m glad I did. Much has been written about Declan Ganley, in an attempt to divine his motivations and ambitions. Some of it was accurate, much of it was not.

Yes, he has a big ego. All powerful men do. Yes, he’s a federalist, genuinely and not out of political convenience. He genuinely detests the likes of UKIP. Yes, he’s a devoted and devout catholic, and faith is important to him. Yes, he has powerful friends in American politics, on both sides of the aisle. It’s the nature of the business he is in. Did opposing Lisbon help with those people? Quite the contrary. If anything, stories about political campaigns in Europe make it harder to win contracts, not easier.

The truth about Declan is that he’s a patriotic guy with a lot of ambition. The smart thing to do would have been to sit Lisbon II out, and wait a better opportunity to take the stage again. If pure ambition was what drove him, that would be the smart play, as I and others counselled. If pure patriotism was what drove him, he would never have stepped off the stage in the first place.

Image control is perhaps the most important aspect of communication, certainly in the current era. There were times when Declan could and should have done things that protected his image and his reputation and refused to do so out of a desire to protect others. Politically and professionally, that may have hurt him in the medium term, but in the long term I think he’ll be back, and he’ll be welcomed.

Will I go back in changed circumstances? I won’t rule it out. Declan, Delia, and their family are wonderful people, who I hope will be friends for the rest of my life, and my door will always be open, but for now it’s time to move on. The challenges the country faces are broader than Europe. The ideas the country needs are not to be found in the pages of the Irish Times or on the airwaves of RTE. Nor are they to be found on the continent, which has spent the last decade labouring in the slow throes of a cultural and social decline against the backdrop of economic stagnation. Nor alas, are they to be found in the reactionary values of Ireland’s far Christian right. Cóir’s attempts to enter the mainstream will fail, because, in the end, the people at the top of that organisation never will be, or want to be, mainstream themselves.

Some weeks ago, Fionnán Sheahan said on RTE’s Frontline programme that “if you don’t want to be in power right now, you have no place in politics.” He’s right. While we all hope and pray that after the recovery, things will never be this bad again, we have the extraordinary privilege of living in extraordinary times in Ireland and the world.  The coming decade will probably define our world for the next century. Will the US accept a quiet passage into the night? Will Europe become a majority Muslim society by 2050 as current trends anticipate? Will Ireland lunge headlong into the same stew of big government and limited freedom that has condemned the rest of our continent to it’s century-long decline? Will western culture, religion, faith, and traditional emerge unscathed?

We live in a melting pot. What comes out of our current uncertainty will certainly not be the same as what has gone into it. For me, this is the time to move on from what I’ve been doing. The challenges yet to come are far more interesting than what has just gone by.  What the future holds for me it has yet to fully reveal, but I’ve decided that part of it, at least, should be this blog. Onwards.