Dana Rosemary Scallon has made a plea for tolerance in Ireland, saying that the ridicule and caricature with which "a few liberals" had greeted her candidacy showed a lack of security, intolerance and intellectual snobbery. Formally launching her presidential campaign in Dublin yesterday, Dana promised "to represent all members of society, the weak and the strong, liberals and conservatives, believers and non-believers alike."
Modern Ireland had been founded on "an ecumenical statement of our beliefs, our creed, our Constitution," she said.
Modern Ireland had room for different opinions, views and beliefs.
She said she had been described in newspaper articles as dangerous, as an ayatollah, a fundamentalist and a right-wing extremist. She was none of these things, she asserted.
This abuse she had received had shown the people of Ireland "that their modern liberal Ireland still has some patches of contemptuous intolerance and intellectual snobbery.
"Are we to inflict this on sections of our own society after suffering so long from the contemptuous intolerance and intellectual snobbery of others?"
Decrying this "intellectual snobbery", she said that a confident Ireland, when picking a President, "doesn't start by assuming that if you don't have third-level education you mightn't know what spoon to use at the State dinner.
"And tell me what is so awful about a possible President having a strong religious belief, that it would be portrayed as a desire to drag modern Ireland, kicking and screaming, back into the 19th century, when all I've done is merely vocalise the values of most of the people of Ireland, no matter what their denomination and creed."
Asked if she would extend the same welcome to Aras an Uachtarain to gay people and lesbians as had been extended by Mrs Mary Robinson, she said all people deserved dignity and respect. She did not believe in treating people in accordance with the labels that were attached to them.
She again said that she had no financial backing from any organisation, group or church. "Not only have I not sought such help, I would have rejected it had it been offered, because I'm not representing any vested interest - I'm representing individuals who may never have joined an organisation in their lives."
She suggested that those who attempted to portray her as a "front" for others were insecure liberals.
"Why would anybody need to believe that I was `fronting' some shadowy organisation?" she asked. "What insecurity is it, in a few liberals, that creates in them the need to conjure up some big controlling bogy-man instead of dealing with the simple things I'm really saying, the values I actually represent?"
She said she stood for beliefs and values "and the right of citizens to express them without fear or ridicule."
In modern liberal Ireland, she said, "to say you respect life at every stage shouldn't result in ridicule or caricature, just as a mature, tolerant society doesn't need to demonise or hurt any woman who has had an abortion."
People had now stopped looking at her as "the nice wee singer who reminds them of a happy time in the past". They saw her as raising issues of the present that were important to them.
"They're coming to me and telling me that they agree with points I'm making and they resent hearing the values I express ridiculed - for they share those values and they fear the erosion of them.
"I'm presenting myself to the people of Ireland not as the representative of a church and not as someone waiting for the opportunity to defeat the will of the people in some high-handed fashion, but as someone who believes in a truly open, tolerant and supportive society where the dignity of each person is respected, where the individual has the right to express their own personally-held views and beliefs; a society where the family is recognised and protected as the natural primary and fundamental unit group of society - but where there is compassion and support for those who for one reason or another do not fit the ideal mould."
She said modernisation should not lead the Irish people to lose their spiritual foundation. The choice, she said, was between a view once outlined by Alexander Solzhenitsyn and one outlined by the State's first president, Douglas Hyde.
Solzhenitsyn said: "To destroy a people you must first sever their roots." Undermining the spiritual foundation of the Irish people would do this, she said.
Hyde said: "We should make the living present a rational continuation of the living past." This was the approach she favoured.