ANALYSIS:Several of Declan Ganley's Eurosceptic dinner guests are key players in his plan to spread the Libertas influence across the EU, writes Peter Murtagh
THE NAMES of many of Declan Ganley's guests who sat down to dinner with him in Dublin's Shelbourne Hotel on Tuesday night were predictable enough.
But there were other names on the guest list, names not so familiar to us in Ireland.
Ganley hopes several of these people will play key roles in his plans to turn his Libertas organisation into a pan-European Union election machine. He hopes that, via next June's elections to the European Parliament, it will kill the Lisbon Treaty once and for all by turning the elections in several EU member states into a proxy referendum on the treaty.
Apart from Vaclav Klaus, guest of honour and president of the Czech Republic, Ganley's fellow diners included the French MEP Philippe de Villiers; Austrian Eurosceptic MEP Hans-Peter Martin; and Jens-Peter Bonde, a longstanding Danish Eurosceptic.
Also there was Dariusz Sobkow, until recently Poland's consul general in Strasbourg. Sobkow was a Polish government representative in Brussels during the premiership of Jaroslaw Kaczynski which was dogged by poor relations between Warsaw and the European Commission. Jaroslaw's twin brother, Lech Kaczynski, is president of Poland and relations between him and the pro-EU government of prime minister Donald Tusk are strained.
The Irish Timesunderstands that Sobkow is about to join Libertas full time and is central to Ganley's plans to project the Eurosceptic message of Libertas into Polish affairs.
Sobkow has associations with far-right Christian groupings in Poland and Polish MEP Richard Czarnecki, who has just joined the Kaczynskis' Law and Justice Party.
Sobkow studied law at Warsaw University and joined the Brussels representation in 1999 as a councillor. From 2004 to 2006, he worked in the secretariat general of the European Parliament.
A well-connected Polish political insider remembers Sobkow from his years in Brussels and Warsaw and doubts his organisational abilities: "He's not a good organiser or a visionary so he himself would be unlikely to be able to build up any kind of political movement himself."
Klaus, who was preceded in office by urbane Czech playwright and communist-era dissident Václav Havel, has loathed the EU for years and regards it as potentially as oppressive as communism. He rows frequently with his own pro-Lisbon Treaty Czech government.
In 2004, just 10 days before the Czech Republic and seven other former communist states fulfilled a long-held ambition to join the EU, he was tolling the death knell of Czech independence. "As everyone is well aware, in a few days our state will cease to exist as an independent and sovereign entity," he wrote in one of his country's leading newspapers.
"We must do everything we can so that we are not lost within the EU, so that our unique existence over a 1,000 years will not crumble and be lost."
Klaus (67) is a staunch Thatcherite who as finance minister guided the Czech transition to capitalism and as prime minister oversaw his country's 1993 split with Slovakia. He has long derided what he sees as the EU's tendency towards "unification, centralisation, bureaucratisation and socialisation".
Klaus and Ganley clearly think alike. After the French electorate rejected the EU constitution in 2005, Klaus said there was "a deep rift between the European political elite and the citizens of . . . European countries".
"The result is hopefully a clear message to everybody. It is a victory of freedom and reason over artificial elitist projects and European bureaucracy."
The same meeting of minds applies to Ganley's relationship with Philippe de Villiers, who attended the dinner with his chief of staff, Christophe Beaudouin. When Ganley met de Villiers two weeks before the Lisbon Treaty referendum, Le Mondenewspaper reported it as "love at first sight".
So immediate was their affinity that Ganley spent some of his summer holiday on de Villiers's farm in Vendée, a part of western France that never accepted the French revolution. De Villiers was born there to aristocratic parents 59 years ago.
His full name is Viscount Philippe Le Jolis de Villiers de Saintignon. De Villiers has long campaigned against abortion, gay marriage, immigration - and against every European treaty. He is the most Islamophobic French politician and has equated Islam with terrorism. "A multicultural society is a multi-conflict society," he says.
De Villiers has already thrown his lot in with Libertas and said candidates from his Mouvement pour la France (MPF) would stand on a Libertas ticket in the June European Parliament elections.
De Villiers led the right-wing No camp in the French referendum campaign in 2005. He turned the European Commission draft services directive drawn up by commissioner Frits Bolkestein into a cause célèbre, renaming it "the Frankenstein directive" and telling the French it would enable the so-called "Polish plumber" - a character he invented - to take their jobs.
He claimed the treaty was "formatted to bring Turkey in and give her a predominant place in the Europe of tomorrow".
Shelbourne diner Hans-Peter Martin, meanwhile, is an independent MEP since 1999 and the self-titled Mr Clean of the European Parliament. Born in Bregenz in 1957, he studied law and political science and worked as a journalist for almost 15 years with Germany's Der Spiegelmagazine among other publications. He is also a prizewinning author of books including Bitter Pills, an investigation of the pharmaceutical industry.
Martin is a regular contributor to Austria's Eurosceptic Kronen Zeitung, which reaches one in four Austrians. In May he introduced to readers as "the Irish Hope", the "worldly wise, intelligent" Declan Ganley.
In a German newspaper article in June, he used Ireland's rejection of the Lisbon Treaty to call for greater democracy and transparency in the EU.
"A 'business-as-usual' approach will hobble the EU. Deliberately ignoring the Irish referendum will encourage exactly what must be fought: political querulousness and Europe fatigue," he wrote. "By the June European elections at the latest, left-wing seducers like [German Left Party leader] Oskar Lafontaine and the clones of the right-wing [recently deceased Austrian politician] Jörg Haider will bring home the harvest."
Friends describe Martin, in his trademark white blazer, as a maverick; foes dismiss him as an ego-driven populist. "Martin is very strong-willed, a man without friends, a griper," said one leading Austrian journalist. "Wherever he goes, he leaves again after a conflict."
Jens-Peter Bonde of Denmark was first elected to the European Parliament in 1979 as a candidate for the People's Movement Against the EU. He is now president of the EU Democrats, an EU-wide umbrella network that provides a political platform for groups seeking fundamental change in the EU.
The National Platform run by Irish academic Anthony Coughlan, who was also at the dinner, is a member of this network while independent MEP Kathy Sinnott, likewise one of Ganley's guests, is also affiliated with Bonde's organisation.
After almost 30 years as an MEP, Bonde resigned his seat in May this year to concentrate on building the EU Democrats as an electoral force in June's European elections. He has also promised to assist Ganley "by turning the European elections into a referendum on the Lisbon constitution" that EU states would not allow their citizens.
Bonde is widely recognised in Denmark and Brussels as one of the most intelligent and knowledgeable opponents of EU integration.
"Bonde's ideology has evolved over the years. At first he was completely against everything to do with the EU. Then he was a Eurosceptic and now a Eurorealist," says Thomas Lauritzen, EU correspondent with Danish newspaper Politiken.
Bonde was originally inspired by classic left-wing humanist ideas such as defending democracy but in recent years he has openly co-operated with nationalist parties in the European Parliament.
"It is become increasingly difficult to understand what his political position is," says Lauritzen.
Other Irish guests included the Green Party's Patricia McKenna, a former MEP and long-time campaigner against EU integration.
Curiously, Klaus equates environmentalism with totalitarianism.
Many of the other 96 diners listed on the table plan, including Ganley, were Libertas organisers. The dinner was also attended by a clutch of Irish and Irish-based journalists sympathetic to Libertas. They included Constantin Gurdgiev, editor of Business & Financemagazine; Eamon Dunphy, the soccer pundit and broadcaster; Bruce Arnold of Independent News Media; Richard Waghorne of the Daily Mail; and Frank Fitzgibbon, Irish editor of the Sunday Times.
• Additional reporting by Dan McLaughlin in Budapest, Lara Marlowe in Paris, Jamie Smyth in Brussels, Derek Scally in Berlin and Deaglán de Bréadún in Dublin