Dana threatens to quit over coverage of family

DANA Rosemary Scallon said she would exit the presidential race if her family continued to be “dragged across” the campaign.

She said her family was more important to her than the presidency and it was “disgusting” that a legal dispute involving her siblings was being reported on.

She also suggested she was being “discriminated against” because she was a practicing Catholic and that “it’s about time that people confronted this anti-Catholicism that’s going on”.

Details emerged last week of the 2008 case in which her sister told a US court that the Independent candidate had decided not to inform voters about her dual US-Irish citizenship ahead of her first run for the presidency in 1997.

She provided a document to the Pat Kenny show on Radio One yesterday which showed that her citizenship was granted on October 8, 1999. Asked why she had not produced it earlier, she said she did not expect the media to “delve into a family matter” and that she had had to search for it.

Asked if her application for citizenship was in train in 1997, she said: “I will not answer any more questions. I applied for citizenship when I went there. I went there in 1991.”

She spoke to her sister on Sunday and did not want to talk about the issue any more as it was too hurtful.

“It was a very turbulent and hard time for my family, we worked our way through it and we are trying to patch up my family.

“My family is more important to me than this presidential election or anything else and I don’t want any more questions regarding it. I will not have my family dragged across this presidential election or I will step out of it.”

She said Barack Obama came here and we searched for “a little bit of Ireland in him”. And if she became president “the Americans would look and say: ‘My goodness there’s a little bit of us in an Irish President and hey, let’s celebrate this’”.

She said she would not like to see gay marriage and that the Constitution “talks about the mother in the home” and saw marriage as being between a man and a woman. However, she said was “sick and tired of being grilled on issues where I’m perfectly in tune with the Constitution”.

“Anyone who’s a practicing Catholic is grilled on these divisive issues and left to feel that you cannot be a president of this country because you will hold things back. Do not discriminate me because I am a Catholic.”