PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION candidate Dana Rosemary Scallon has insisted it is perfectly in order for her to hold US citizenship in addition to her Irish citizenship.
Ms Scallon said there was “absolutely no conflict” involved in her dual citizenship because Ireland was one of the few countries having such an arrangement with the US.
She was responding to a report in yesterday's Irish Timeson a US court case in which it was stated that she became a US citizen before putting her name forward for the 1997 presidential election, but a decision was taken not to inform the electorate.
Ms Scallon confirmed she does have US citizenship but said this was not the case until 1999, after she had stood in the 1997 election.
In the court case, her sister, Susan Stein, claimed that at a meeting with Dana’s husband, Damien Scallon, and her brother, John Brown, it was decided it “wouldn’t look very good” if people in Ireland knew she was an American citizen.
Yesterday, Ms Scallon said she was not party to this conversation and her husband and brother had no memory of it. She claimed the media had reached “a very low ebb” by publicising “a family crisis” to make her seem like a liar, which she was not.
Asked whether she had taken the oath of allegiance that naturalised US citizens have to take, and which requires them to renounce their allegiance to all other states, she said she obviously had taken it.
However, before doing so, she stated to the official that she could not give up her Irish citizenship and he had said this wasn't a problem because there was a "unique relationship" between the countries. "I was absolutely assured that the oath had no effect on my allegiance to this country," she told presenter Seán O'Rourke on RTÉ Radio 1's News at One.
Éamon de Valera, who was born in the US, was in the same position of having dual citizenship, she added.
O’Rourke, pointing out that de Valera gave up his US citizenship, asked whether she considered the US oath of allegiance to be an “empty formula”, as de Valera had described the oath of allegiance to the British queen. She replied: “I was perfectly assured that I could take up dual citizenship with no conflict with my Irish citizenship.”
Asked whether she swore on a Bible when making the oath, she said she didn’t think so. The ceremony involved raising your hand in a roomful of people, she said.
Asked about criticism by the judge in the case of the evidence she and other parties had given, she said judges weren’t always right but she had to accept “whatever the judge felt”.
“I was not a [US] citizen in 1997. I was a citizen in 1999, I’m not ashamed of that and I’ve no reason to hide it,” she said.
Speaking earlier in Co Kerry, Ms Scallon said she was glad to have left the rarefied atmosphere of Dublin 4. She said every family had disputes and it was “stooping to a new low” to raise a family matter. “At the bottom of it all I love my family and we have reached agreement,” she said of the dispute aired in court in Iowa.
Ms Scallon said she had applied for US citizenship because her husband went to work in the US, like many Irish, and for the family to remain there legally. Asked whether she would renounce US citizenship if necessary, she said: “My American citizenship is an advantage.” Dual citizenship had put her in “a unique position” to be able to speak for Irish in the US.