Criticising Dana is like clubbing a baby seal - there may be good reasons for the cull, but with those big eyes looking up at you, you'd have to be an awful swine to do it. In a column here a fortnight ago, I treated her with the robustness that is appropriate to what she claims to be - a politician canvassing for public office. The wounded tone of many of the letters from her supporters suggests that this is not the way they see her at all. They regard her, apparently, as a candidate for sainthood, not for the Presidency. And, that, in turn, says a great deal more about her campaign than any reply I could make.
There is, however, one aspect of the protests that I would like to take up - the accusation that I was guilty of anti-Catholicism. The charge is that my column was a "facade used to attack Catholics and. . .denigrate the Catholic Church." David Quinn, editor of the Irish Catholic, summed up the complaint of those who have been offended by my column when he told the readers of the Sunday Times that my contention was that "as far as public office goes. . .Catholics need not apply".
The interesting word here is "Catholics", and the meaning it has for those who have accused me of "secular sectarianism" is worth examining. Three weeks before I wrote here about Dana's presidential bid, I wrote another column about the Presidency. In it, I argued for an election between candidates outside the party system and suggested "the kind of candidates the parties should be looking for".
I wrote then that, "One obvious group to look towards is those religious figures who have embodied a sense of inclusiveness in their lives and visions: the historian and nun, Dr Margaret MacCurtain; the former Presbyterian moderator, Dr John Dunlop; the Catholic theologian, Prof Enda MacDonagh; the Presbyterian clergyman and Gaelic scholar, Terence McCaughey; the nun and anti-poverty campaigner, Sister Stanislaus Kennedy".
Three of these suggested nominees are not merely Catholics, but are active in religious life. I mentioned them because they seem to me to be people of the stature that the office needs - individuals of great integrity and intellectual distinction who have courageously engaged with the changing nature of Irish reality. Each has, in a different way, seen the fulfilment of a particular religious tradition, not in the holding and wielding of temporal power, but in the expansion of equal citizenship to include women, the economically marginalised and those of a non-Catholic tradition.
Apparently, though, preferring such distinguished people to someone who has not lived in the State for any extended period, who has no record in Irish public life, and who wants to import American televangelism into Ireland, is proof of anti-Catholic bias. Proposing three prominent Catholics as suitable candidates for the Presidency, but objecting to another, means saying that "as far as public office goes. . .Catholics need not apply".
And however bizarre such a charge may seem, it has a certain logic. Margaret MacCurtain, Enda McDonagh and Stanislaus Kennedy are not in fact "Catholics" in the sense that many of the people trying to sell President Dana understand the word. They lack an essential ingredient of orthodoxy: the belief that the State should be run according to the rules for the time being of one particular church. They are not authoritarian, patriarchal conservatives.
Unlike Dana, who openly expresses the Iranian view that the democratically elected government of the State is not sovereign but subject to the law of God (interpreted, of course, by self-appointed ayatollahs) they have made huge contributions to the kind of pluralist, inclusive democracy that is the only hope for this island. It seems to me that in the eyes of people like David Quinn, this is evidently enough to place them outside the reach of the term "Catholic". In the fundamentalist world view, those who are not with you are against you. If you don't favour theocratic rule, you are anti-Catholic.
What religious conservatives refuse to recognise, though, is that "Catholicism", in Ireland or elsewhere, is not one thing. They are unable to come to terms with the fact that their real problem is not atheism or secularism but Catholicism - the very large section of their own church that chooses not to follow the religious and ideological agenda of the present Pope.
The awkward truth is that the so-called "liberal agenda" is not a vile plot, but a result of the moral and intellectual choices of Irish Catholics. It can be assumed that the 50 per cent of the electorate which voted for divorce was mostly made up of baptised Catholics. Likewise, the hefty majorities which voted in favour of the right to abortion information and to travel for an abortion. And the large majority of Catholic married couples which uses artificial contraception.
In an MRBI poll for The Irish Times in December 1996, just a fifth of Catholics said that they followed the teaching of their church when making "serious moral decisions", compared to 78 per cent who said they would follow their own conscience. Real live Catholicism - the beliefs and values of ordinary members of the church - is something very different from the uniform, monolithic orthodoxy that Dana's supporters would like it to be. Their aim of a Catholic state for a Catholic people begs the questions - which Catholics? What people?
Those who believe that Catholicism is inextricable from right-wing politics deal with all of this by pretending it is not happening. They dismiss the complex morality of liberal Catholics as mere decadence.
Few rhetorical devices, though, are shallower than the sleight-of-mind that tries to turn criticism of one part of a large group into an attack on the group itself. It is a form of mock-outrage, designed to dodge legitimate criticism by pretending to believe that it is motivated by prejudice. Thus, to believe that O.J. Simpson is guilty is to be a racist. To criticise the policies of the Israeli government is to be an anti-semite. To think that the institutional church has behaved outrageously on the issue of child sexual abuse is to be anti-Catholic.
Slinging such terms around may comfort the faithful for a while, but it betrays a terrible lack of real intellectual conviction. I make no apology whatsoever for saying that the attempt to soft-sell a return to theocracy with showbiz sweetness is a symptom of that deficiency. When the silly season is over and Dana has gone the way of Dodi and Di, the conservatives should drop the show of victimhood and ask themselves why so many of their co-religionists have walked away from their dangerous absolutism. The answer to that question might reveal who really is afraid of Irish Catholics.