News- Ireland

Not President, but Precedent

In the Irish presidential election, the most remarkable result was achieved not by the eventual winner but by an upstart pro-life candidate.

By Kieron Wood

At first Dana thought the request was a joke, and threw the letter in the trash can.

"I have always believed that abortion kills the child, wounds the mother and can kill the soul of a nation."

"It may be President McAleese, but it’s also Precedent Dana" ran the headline in the Irish Times.

The final result of the presidential election in the Republic of Ireland came as no great surprise. Professor Mary McAleese, the candidate backed by the ruling Fianna Fail/Progressive Democrat coalition government, romped home, comfortably clear of her nearest rival. But the biggest surprise of the campaign was the showing of the pro-life, pro-family campaigner Dana, the political unknown whose support in the polls defied all the pundits' predictions.

When the 44-year-old Irish-born singer announced her candidacy for the presidency, Irish Times columnist Fintan O’Toole sneered: "The very absurdity of the idea is significant…for it arises from what must be desperation on a heroic scale." Even the chairman of the Pro-Life Campaign, veteran politician and former Senator Des Hanafin, assured journalists: "To be realistic, that girl has no chance whatsoever of getting a nomination." Britain’s Press Association agreed: "The down-to-earth reality is that the entertainer will not be endorsed by the 20 members of the Irish parliament necessary to secure her nomination to run for the post."

Yet, not only did Dana manage to secure a nomination, but she finally cornered almost 14 percent of the national vote. In the constituencies of Donegal in the northwest of Ireland, almost a quarter of the electorate voted for her, a constituency which left her second only to the eventual winning candidate.

Dana’s bid for the presidency began in the early summer, when Ireland’s President Mary Robinson announced that she planned to retire early to take up the high-profile position of United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

Pro-life activists wrote to Dana at her family home in Alabama, begging her to consider returning home from America to stand as a candidate. At first Dana thought the request was a joke, and threw the letter in the trash can.

But the Irish media learned of the approach, and the resulting publicity led to a flood of letters, begging Dana to reconsider. The writers were mostly traditionally-minded Irish Catholics who felt disenfranchised by the increasingly liberal tendencies of the main political parties.

In Ireland, the President is elected by popular vote. Prospective candidates have to have the support of 20 members of the Oireachtas, the Republic’s parliament. An alternative method of nomination, which had never been used before, was to be nominated by four county councils.

The newspapers were full of speculation about an admittedly formidable candidate: John Hume, the head of Northern Ireland’s Social Democratic and Labor Party. Former Irish prime minister Albert Reynolds was also seen as a potential front-runner. But the first official candidate into the field was Dana.

Born Rosemary Browne in the northern city of Derry, Dana had leapt to fame in 1970 when she gave Ireland its first victory in the prestigious Eurovision Song Contest with her song "All Kinds Of Everything." In 1991, Dana had moved with her family to Alabama, where she presented the program "Say Yes" on Mother Angelica’s Eternal Word Television Network..

The Irish Times jeered: "When she threw her hat into the ring, the sound of raucous laughter reverberated throughout the country." But the laughter was silenced when Dana was nominated for the presidency by county councils in Donegal, Longford, Wicklow, Tipperary, and Kerry.

Shocked government ministers suddenly realized that the election was no longer a shoo-in. Dana’s appeal to traditional Irish principles--particularly pro-life principles--threatened to become an important campaign issue. The government’s response was to choose a candidate who, like the outgoing President Robinson, was a female, a lawyer and a feminist, but--unlike President Robinson--was avowedly anti-abortion.

The 46-year-old Professor Mary McAleese was the first woman (and first Catholic) Vice-Chancellor of Queen’s University in Belfast. Although her support for gay rights and women priests alienated many conservative voters, she had always been outspokenly pro-life.

Professor McAleese’s main rival was seen as European parliamentarian Mary Banotti, who was backed by the country’s second-largest political party, Fine Gael. The 58-year-old divorcee capitalized on her wide political experience and the fact that she was a grandniece of the Irish Civil War hero, Michael Collins.

The left-wing candidate Adi Roche--supported by the Labor Party, Democratic Left, and the Green Party--was well known for managing the Chernobyl Children’s Project, which organized holidays in Ireland and the US for sick and deprived children from the former Soviet Union.

The only male candidate was 60-year-old former police union official Derek Nally, who fought for the election on an anti-corruption platform.

The Irish media united against Dana, proclaiming her a "right-wing fundamentalist". But she refused to back off her principles. She told the Irish Times:

Many voters, while supporting Dana’s views, apparently believed she had no chance of winning, and so they voted instead for McAleese in order to prevent Banotti from snatching a victory. But despite such tactical voting, and without any of the financial and organizational support provided by the political party machines, Dana still won more votes than Roche and Nally combined.

The final result was:

•• Mary McAleese 574,424 votes (45 percent)

•• Mary Banotti 372,002 (29 percent)

•• Dana 175,458 (14 percent)

•• Adi Roche 88,423 (7 percent)

•• Derek Nally 59,529 (5 percent)

By the end of the campaign, the media had changed its tune. Dana had woven her spell around even the most liberal and misogynistic journalists. In a feature headed "Lurch to the right," the Irish Times conceded that "Dana’s rise in the polls clearly continued to the end of a campaign in which she won friends and admiration, even among many who had little time for her nostalgic attachment to 'traditional values.'" Another report agreed that "there was no doubt that she had earned respect and affection from all sides in the campaign."

The question for Dana now is: what next? She has already said that she would consider standing as a candidate for the Irish parliament. She told journalists: "There has to be a rethinking among the politicians here. There is a wide range of people who feel they do not have a political voice." Dana now has to decide whether she wants to give them that voice.

Kieron Wood, a regular CWN contributor, writes from Dublin.

Mary McAleese was inaugurated as President of Ireland on November 11. The eldest of 9 children, she is the second woman to fill the post, and the first from northern Ireland. She is married to a dentist and they have three children.

President McAleese is known as a practicing Catholic, with strongly pro-life views. In 1986 she scripted and presented an anti-divorce video. The following year, she took part in a Catholic Church video opposing in vitro fertilisation. In an interview, she revealed that she was opposed to contraception and that she and her husband used natural family planning.

In 1987, as chairwoman of the Constitution Rights Campaign, she lobbied against Irish integration into the European Union, which she said would threaten the right to life of the unborn and Irish neutrality.

But President McAleese’s views on the institutional Catholic Church are mixed.

On one occasion, she rebuked a priest dressed in "a soft grayish-blue double-breasted French suit, Italian shoes" and with a "wee discreet cross". The priest was due to be posted to the Ardoyne area of Belfast where she lived. She told him: "I hope to hell you’ve a black suit; I hope you’re not going in that!" She explained afterwards: "I took a great pride that our priests could walk freely through Ardoyne wearing their clerical garb, and that it was a kind of witness."

But President McAleese’s views on women in the Church are not quite as traditional. At a meeting organised by supporters of women priests, she welcomed the advent of altar girls as "a small first victory for Christian feminists within the Catholic Church, among whom are a highly-educated generation of young men and women who will not suffer sexist fools gladly."