If the showers have seemed especially heavy of late, it's probably because the people who think Dana is going to be President came down in the last one. Dana is not going to be President because, for a start, she is not going to be a presidential candidate. The main political parties are the gatekeepers for the Park, and they have no intention of letting her through.
Were it not for what it tells us about the state of Catholic conservatism in Ireland, the notion of Dana coming to the Aras from Alabama with a banjo on her knee would not be worth talking about. The very absurdity of the idea is significant, though, for it arises from what must be desperation on a heroic scale.
The conservatives have seen what Mary Robinson has done for liberal Ireland. They have had to sit and watch as a woman who opposed them through all the battles over contraception, divorce and abortion has become the acceptable face of Ireland. They want to seize back the symbolic high ground. And they pick . . . Dana?
If Labour was proposing to run Susan McCann, Fianna Fail was trying to induce Brendan Bowyer to hucklebuck his way to the Park and Fine Gael activists were queuing up to be backing vocalists for President Big Tom, it would be pretty obvious those parties were on the way out.
If a group of non-aligned godless atheists was floating the idea of some kind of Irish Elvis Presley for President, it would be recognised as a cry for help. That the once-mighty forces of the Church Militant can imagine no better image to inscribe on their banners than that of a cabaret singer who had a hit in 1970 is, likewise, a sad declaration of bankruptcy.
Celebrity politics are bad enough at the best of times, but when you have to rely on the forgotten glamour of the nearly famous, you're in big trouble. At least when Tony Blair snuggled up to Oasis, or when Garret FitzGerald aligned himself with Bono, the borrowed garment in which they were wrapping themselves had the virtue of being genuinely chic. If you have to rummage in the cupboard of cable TV in the Bible Belt, you must be pretty near naked.
There is, though, something deeply touching about the whole thing. The Ireland that the Catholic right dreams of never existed outside the pages of Knocknagow. And its pale imitations - curly ham sandwiches on the sideline of the hurling pitch, cycling to sodality, Cidona at the ceili - have long since faded to nothingness.
The dreamers are painfully aware that they need to get to grips with Irish modernity. They know that they are sinking fast. They know there is something out there, just beyond their grasp, that they could use to haul themselves out of the swamps of oblivion and on to the shores of power.
And what do they imagine it to be, this image of Irish modernity to which they can cling? The Eurovision Song Contest of 1970. For them, an event that was gauche and dated more than a quarter of a century ago is the ultimate image of what groovy, with-it young Ireland is all about. They are the oldest swingers in town, trying to do the twist to a techno beat.
Dana singing All Kinds of Everything at the Eurovision was, as it happens, the last moment at which it was possible to imagine that the new forces of television, Europe, technology and pop culture might not, after all, be a threat to the old order of church and state.
If you desperately wanted to believe that all of this new-fangledness would do nothing to threaten the way we were, then this snub-nosed, gap-toothed girl, her long hair sweetly parted, singing of wishing wells and wedding bells was what you wanted to see and hear. If you needed to believe that the old Ireland would go on for ever, Dana was your kind of girl.
But even then it was an evident exercise in escapism. The real Derry air was actually soaked with tear gas.
The Irish popular music industry was already a world of sharp-eyed promoters, restless dancers and groupies in the back of the van. Television was creating a public realm beyond church control. And Europe was not a succession of nice juries in love with our innocence, but a rough marketplace to which, if we wanted to survive, we would be forced to adapt.
If there was a gulf between Dana's island and the real Ireland way back then, it has by now widened into an ocean. Only those who think that Michael, Row the Boat Ashore and Cumbaya are at the leading edge of pop culture could still believe that Dana's combination of hardline dogma with soft-eyed appeal could ever be a workable emblem of contemporary Ireland.
Have her supporters never seen the comedian Kevin McAleer doing his surreal, deadpan rendition of All Kinds of Everything, in which its jingling sentiments are spoken, with great comic effect, as if they were words from a dead language? Do they not know that for the majority of the population, Dana exists as a figure from McAleer's sketch.
Do they think that no one remembers that at the last great outbreak of happy-clappy fundamentalism in Ireland - the Pope's Youth Mass in Galway in 1979 - the warm-up men were Eamon Casey and Michael Cleary?
When Dana was nearly famous, Irish people felt so inferior that they were flattered by any favourable attention from abroad, even if it was only the dubious honour of winning the Eurovision. Back then, the notion of having your own show on Alabama cable television was impossibly exotic. Now, we pray that we will not win the Eurovision. We know that Alabama cable TV is no more exotic than Longford local radio. And to the extent that we still like foreigners to think well of us, we don't imagine that a sentimental song and lovely eyelashes are the way to international respect.
The fact that a significant section of Catholic conservatism doesn't seem to know any of this says a lot about its failure to become a real force in Irish politics. It undoubtedly has a constituency - about a third of the electorate is probably open to the influence of hardline orthodoxy. But it is, ironically, paying the price of the church's decades of triumphalism.
At the height of its power, the church threw its weight around too heavily. By seeking to control cultural life in Ireland, it alienated the intellectuals. And it has never managed to get them back. Orthodox conservative Catholicism has been left with so few icons that even Dana seems a resonant, charismatic figure. And that's about as good a definition of deep trouble as you can get.