THE SATURDAY INTERVIEW: DANA ROSEMARY SCALLAN:She's a singer, a Eurovision success story and a pro-life crusader, but with a respectable presidential campaign – which she could yet repeat – and a stint as an MEP under her belt, Dana Rosemary Scallon is a politician to her bones. For proof, just ask her what she would think of David Norris as president
IT’S LATE ON Sunday evening at a hotel in the suburbs of Dublin. A piano tinkles in the background. A couple argue discreetly over cocktails. A woman in a black and white top walks purposefully through the door and is immediately collared by a man who knows her from somewhere. The woman, Dana Rosemary Scallon, does that thing that people who have been famous for a long time manage so expertly. She makes deliberate eye contact, sprinkles the conversation with common ground and touches his arm, all gestures designed to ensure the man has a meaningful encounter with a celebrity. The man leaves smiling, evidently satisfied.
The singer is in Dublin for just one night. Later this evening she will drive herself home to Galway, and the following day the mother of four, a grandmother too now, will fly to the US, where she is participating in a Christian conference. After that she is going on holiday with her husband, on a cruise. She has been travelling all day, by train and ferry from England, where she was on a tour to celebrate the 40 years since her Eurovision win.
"Forty years," she sighs, ordering coffee to wake herself up and settling into an armchair. Forty years since a tiny gap-toothed teenager from the Bogside, in Derry, Rosemary Brown, nicknamed Dana, took to the stage in Amsterdam and blew Mary Hopkin and Julio Iglesias out of the water. Four decades since All Kinds of Everythingknocked Simon and Garfunkel's Bridge Over Troubled Watersoff the top of the UK charts. "It's probably the same for most people," she says. "It just does not feel like all those years have passed. Of course you are a different person physically and emotionally in every way, but when you are up there in concert there is this rapport with the audience, and you don't really think about how much time has passed. I just try to breathe in when I stand sideways."
There's no need. A few years ago she went on RTÉ's The Afternoon Showto shift some poundage in advance of her daughter's wedding, and though she is in self-deprecating mode she looks to be in great shape. She was an extremely good-looking girl back then, though seemingly unaware of it, an Irish ingenue, and at nearly 60 she is still a very attractive woman. The telegenic face combined with her showbiz experience made Dana an inspired choice as one of the judges on the Britain's Got Talent-style programme The All-Ireland Talent Show.
She was honest about the participants on that parish-pump variety fest, but she's no Simon Cowell. Earlier this year she featured on a panel on The Late Late Showwhen the Irish Eurovision entry was chosen. She barely gave half an opinion on any of the songs, telling an increasingly exasperated Ryan Tubridy that she didn't want to comment. I tell her that this fence-sitting display made for infuriating telly, and she wastes no time explaining what actually happened.
“Before the show started I specifically asked the producers did I have to give comments, and I was told in a text – I have the text; I can show you – I was told no, I should just relax, I was there to sing and be interviewed about the 40th anniversary but I did not have to comment on the songs,” she says. “Then, when I kept being asked to comment on the songs, I felt bounced, I wasn’t prepared, and I didn’t feel comfortable with it all. There were judging panels across the country, and the public were judging, too. I didn’t want to influence the voting with my opinions.”
She was happy with the song the public chose and even happier with the singer. "I think it's a good song, and I think Niamh Kavanagh is a world-class singer. I've always really liked her. I love her laid-back way. Thank goodness she has promised she is not going to wear that dress," she says, referring to the unflattering explosion of bodice-ripping lace Kavanagh wore on the Late Late. The Eurovision, once an actual song contest as opposed to an outlandish costume and choreography face-off, is an unpredictable beast. "I think we might have a chance – at least it's not Dustin," she says, referencing her famous spat with the turkey. She did not endorse his participation in the Eurovision a couple of years ago, and the bird was not pleased.
We don't talk much more about the Eurovision or even about showbiz. Politics dominates the rest of the conversation. I've heard that she might be interested in running for the presidency again, a subject that seems more pressing than what she thinks of the hot-favourite Norwegian entry in the Eurovision, My Heart Is Yours, sung by Didrik Solli-Tangen.
DANA CAME OUTof nowhere in the 1997 presidential race. She managed to get a nomination through the support of county councils, becoming the only person ever to be nominated outside the traditional party route.
When commentators stopped laughing they started fulminating about the candidate’s Christian views. She is a champion of “family and of life at all its stages”, as she puts it.
For a politics virgin she conducted a solid campaign, garnering 15 per cent of the popular vote and coming a respectable third out of five candidates. That success was followed by a win during the European elections in 1999, after which she spent five years as MEP for Connaught-Ulster, during which time she was one of the first people to start talking about the then draft constitution for Europe, back when the Lisbon referendums were only a twinkle in the government’s eye.
She was bruised by politics. “I never experienced a sense of being hated before I went into that arena,” she says. “I had someone spit at me once. I’ve had people not wanting to shake my hand. All because I was contesting someone’s candidate or saying something that upset them about the party they support. When I put my head above the parapet I knew all kinds of things would be thrown at me. I was really afraid of losing any shred of integrity I had built up over the years, and I was afraid of being laughed at – and yes, I was laughed at, but if you want to stand up for what you believe in and fight for the people you are representing, you have to be willing to take that ridicule.”
So what about Dana for president again? Her answer is as studied as it is ambiguous. “What I would say is that I would seriously look at all options,” she says. She has been approached to run “by various sources – people ask, everywhere I go”, and if she did it seems she would be motivated by what she sees as the injustice of “the three main political parties all singing off the hymn sheet of Europe . . . They are saying with regard to Europe ‘don’t worry about a thing’, but the people of this country know their constitutional rights are being undermined”. She thought Lisbon 2 was “a gross insult to the people of this country and showed up the undemocratic nature of the European Union as it is today. I was horrified by it. I’ve been rattling on about that constitution since the end of 1999 and all I can say is that I am not at ease with the way the people of this country have been bullied.” This is the political fire in her belly. If she does run again – and it’s a possibility, however remote – what she sees as “the erosion of our constitutional rights by Europe”, particularly those relating to the family, will be the cornerstone of her campaign.
TALKING TO DANA,it's clear she is a politician to her bones. While much of the time she speaks her mind she, like the most skilled politicians, is a master at evading questions she knows might get her into trouble. I ask what she would think of David Norris as president. I ask several different ways and am still none the wiser: David Norris for president, what do you think? "We've got on very well . . . That is up to the people of the country". Would a homosexual president bother you? Long pause. "Well." Longer pause. "You put your hat in the ring and you take a chance, and if that's what people vote for, then that's what they vote for." But how would you personally feel about it? "I would have to see who else was running, and then I would see who to vote for."
Then she goes off on a tangent about the accents of various presidential candidates and a man at the ploughing championships who once said he couldn’t vote for her because he couldn’t stand listening to a Nordy accent for seven years. “I was awfully satisfied thinking of him listening to Mary McAleese for all that time,” she says with a smile. The Norris/homosexuality question remains unanswered. God, she’s good.
She is unapologetic about her Christianity-based views and is offended when I suggest that some people can’t get past them. There are some who would view her as fundamentalist. Would that be fair? “No it’s not fair. It’s not fair,” she says slapping her thigh sharply for emphasis. “It’s a very limited, thumbnail sketch of not just me but anybody else who is pro-life and pro-family. I think it’s very lazy. It saddens me that people don’t make an effort to know somebody before they make a thumbnail sketch. But it is a very common thing that if you are pro-life or pro-family you are regarded as a very one-dimensional fundamentalist, and it is insulting, and it is lazy, and it is unjustified.”
She’s right, of course. There is much more to her: that’s obvious even from a cursory flick through her autobiography. I came across it recently in the bargain basement of a Dublin bookshop. She was in good company. A book by Michael D Higgins, another possible presidential candidate, was also on display. The flyleaf sums her up: “From a childhood in the Bogside of Derry, through the maelstrom of international showbiz, to the White House and the Vatican, to the European Parliament and all its political intrigue, Dana’s story is truly astonishing.” Even accounting for autobiographical hyperbole, it’s fair to say she has had a remarkable journey so far.
If talking about her detractors clearly irritates her, for the rest of the time she is interesting, often humorous company. She has the politician’s gift of making a person feel they are the most important person in the room. She asks more questions of the interviewer than do most interviewees.
Her charm and intelligence make it easy to see why she found support in unlikely quarters during her political campaigns. Hard-bitten cynics were impressed, even if they couldn’t put their finger on why.
When she went for the presidency the late Jonathan Philbin Bowman became a surprising back-room player on her campaign. When she was unsuccessful, he was the architect of the elegant phrase that, while she might not be president, her nomination by the county councils meant that she was “a precedent”. For him and for others she was a living, breathing opportunity to put into action the words of Voltaire: “I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”
DANA'S EVASIVENESS,particularly about the possibility of her running for president, is understandable. It has been a rough time for the Scallon family. Her mother died last year, other relatives have died and now a close family friend is fighting serious illness. "Families go through those periods; we are just in one of those stages," she says. "My mother died and then there were two more funerals within a few months. I don't know how people survive these times. Without faith that there is a higher power, a God, I just couldn't get through things in my life."
She wasn’t always so faithful. She says she wasn’t a true believer until the discovery of a benign growth on her vocal cords in 1973 forced her to take stock of what was important in life.
Regarding the crisis in the Catholic Church at the moment, she says it has been a “horrendous” time for believers. “But most horrendous for the abused, and that’s what you have to keep in focus,” she says. She believes the uncovering of the sex-abuse scandals in the church is good for the institution. “I think it means there will be a cleaning-out of the church; this was never the way the church was meant to be,” she says. She sits on the fence again when asked about the recent “apparitions” at Knock. “I am not saying there aren’t experiences like that, I am not dismissing it can happen, but I do think you have to have great prudence in what is validated or not,” she says.
What has her faith taught her? “I just know that if you are trying to live a Christian life, and we all mess it up, it isn’t what you say that matters, it’s how you live your life and how you treat people. What you say does not matter as much as what you do.”
She does a lot. Work never seems to dry up for Dana. When her husband got work with a Christian retreat centre and they moved to Birmingham, Alabama, in the 1980s, she landed herself a job as a kind of Bible-toting Oprah Winfrey, with her own TV show, interviewing Christian musicians. She is a reality-TV staple in Ireland now: The Late Late Showcan always be relied on to call her in for a spot of Eurovision punditry, despite the recent miscommunication, and there is still demand for her live performances here and in the UK.
After the Christian conference in the US there will be more filming for her latest television series, Dana and Friends, on the Eternal Word Television Network, and then it's on to the Best of Britishvariety tour in the autumn, when she will be the "token Irish" performer. After the conference there is that cruise with her husband to look forward to. Where is she going? "To Bermuda, so I may never come back," she warns.
Note to Dana detractors: She’s joking. There’s a potential presidential campaign to mastermind. Maybe.
CV
EDUCATIONThornhill College, Derry
CAREERAt 18 she won the Eurovision Song Contest with All Kinds of Everything,in 1970. She had considerable chart success before moving into Christian music, writing the Irish chart-topper Totus Tuusas a response to the pope's visit to Ireland in 1979. She spent seven years in the US as a TV presenter on a Christian network before moving back to Ireland to contest the 1997 presidential election. Two years later she became an MEP for Connaught Ulster. More recently she was a participant in the RTÉ reality TV shows Celebrity Jigs and Reelsand the All Ireland Talent Show.
FAMILYMarried to Damian Scallon; mother to four children: Grace, Ruth, John James and Robert.
