Jim Higgins comments on Declan Ganley and the US military are backed by Fine Gael party

The full text of Jim Higgins speech is on the Fine Gael website. Given that ganley tried to sue Higgins only a few months ago over the same claims regarding Ganley's unsavory motives this implies that the whole party have disregarded Ganley's legal threats.
It will be interesting to see if new legal threats are issued by Ganley or will he accept that the truth should be in the public domain.
The below is the portion of the speech dealing with Declan Ganley and his secretive Libertas party.

The decision by the Irish people to reject the Lisbon Treaty is nothing short of a catastrophe. We have pushed ourselves from the heart of Europe to the fringe of Europe. We have jeopardised the possibility of further, but much-needed funding for infrastructure and agriculture. We have damaged our international reputation and prospects of jobs from direct foreign investment, not to speak of retaining the vital important US jobs which up to now have been a key component in our economy.

I cannot emphasise strongly enough how crucially important it is that whenever Lisbon is put to the people again, we do everything possible to ensure that the electorate turn away from the lunatic fringe which mounted a deliberately misleading and spurious campaign. The Lisbon Treaty protected every vital Irish interest - our attractive corporation tax, our neutrality, our stance on defence and last, but by no means least, our total revulsion and rejection of abortion. To manage to get the people of Ireland to buy into an alliance of Sinn Féin and Libertas speaks volumes in terms of the ability of the two ends of the spectrum to find common cause, all designed to sabotage our vital national interest.

I welcome Mr Declan Ganley's decision to contest this election. At long last we might be in a position to find out exactly what Mr Ganley's agenda is.

He will have to tell the people why ten months after the Lisbon vote he has constantly refused to tell the Standards in Public Office Commission the nature and conditions of his personal loan to the Libertas Lisbon campaign and the involvement of his Rivada Networks staff. This is the Lord of the Manor who lectures from on high in relation to transparency. It begs the question, what is Mr Ganley hiding?

He will have to explain why two of the Eastern European politicians who signed his ratification for recognition as a political party have now withdrawn their signatures.

He will have to come clean about the one million Swedish Krona offered to the Swedish Euro sceptic political party Junilistan to add the name of Libertas to its title, only to be told by its leader "I was insulted. It would be extremely unethical for our party to be funded by a millionaire from another country."

People would like to know why, after courting and supporting the ultra right wing Catholic LPR party in Poland, Mr Ganley has suddenly bolted in the opposite direction this week.

Mr Ganley likes to parade himself as a loyal Irish man. Why then has he described himself in the past as British? Why has he appointed on to his board four-star US generals, a former British SAS general and high-ranking former defence staff?

The truth is that Mr Ganley is a puppet of the US military. The truth is that the United States military are frightened stiff of a united and stronger European Union through the Lisbon Treaty. The truth is that Mr Ganley does not want a united Europe. Anything that would get in the way of his multi-million dollar contracts with the US military must be opposed. Hence his opposition to Lisbon. Hence his reason to contest these elections.

It was once famously said that the first casualty of war is the truth. At his campaign launch last week, Mr Ganley accused me of voting for a €9.2 million swimming pool and sauna for the European Parliament. I never voted for such a project, and neither did any of my colleagues. Declan, if you continue with such malicious claims I will be seeing you in another forum and it won't be the European Parliament. You pretend to be pro-Europe. The reality is that you are anti-Europe.