Dana makes light work of `baggage'

"Some of her baggage is killing her," said a woman in a Gorey pub, eyeing Dana's soft, solicitous, tactile progress among the converted. "I'm a practising Catholic, abortion is a private matter. Hopefully, there's more to her than that," the woman added. On the face of it yesterday in Wicklow and Wexford, the "baggage" seemed anything but an impediment. In fact, the groups of men and women who turned out in the driving rain to hear her message would have been pretty dismayed had she arrived without it.

For example, her conclusions about pregnancy avoidance for a rape/incest victim were not altogether clear in her Pat Kenny interview, said The Irish Times. Could she clarify the kind of immediate treatment she would allow rape or incest victims who might be pregnant?

"What do you mean by `treatment'?" The morning-after pill, for example. "No. I wouldn't support the morning-after pill at all, not even in a case of rape or incest. It hasn't even been properly investigated. It's not been that long on the market and a lot of women are almost being used as guinea pigs by the pharmaceutical companies."

"Abortion is a violation of women. Seeing it as a solution belittles women," she said. What if a pregnant young woman is suicidal, asked Joe Duffy. "It's never been recorded. There's more chance of a woman committing suicide over depression than over pregnancy."

Anyway, this is not simply about abortion. "In countries where there is abortion on demand, euthanasia follows on. That's proven," she said with certainty, the kind of certainty her audience had come to hear, a sector that is certain it has been silenced and scorned by "arrogant intellectuals".

It was a point Dana reiterated at each campaign stop: "There's a whole section of people afraid to lift their heads because they are branded as being out of fashion, out of date . . ." Her followers agreed, quite fiercely on occasions.

But why then did the election polls not support this suspicion of a vast body silenced? Christine Doyle, the candidate's escort around Arklow, who claimed not to have read a paper for 10 years, so deep was her distrust of the media, thought she had the answer: "A lot of people had the wool pulled over their eyes . . ."

Clearly, these people feel they had found a new leader. Who would they have looked up to now? Mildred Fox's name cropped up repeatedly in Arklow.

But further south, Maureen Brennan, a past campaigner for Gerald Casey of Christian Solidarity and the woman who had efficiently assembled the crowd in the Gorey pub at 24 hours notice didn't hesitate: "William Binchy would be our leader. He stayed overnight in our home during the first divorce campaign.

"Of course, the last campaign was taken over by the media and Dick Spring, alas. That is why we now have divorce in Ireland."

They listened, rapt, as Dana articulated her concerns for an Ireland whose "roots are being stamped out . . . There has been a demonising of pro-life and I think it's unfair".

So far, she told us, £30,000 to £40,000 had gone into the campaign, all family money. So far she had lost nearly half-a-stone in weight. But the odds on her election, she grinned, are down from 100 to 1 to 25 to 1. And she never wept over Vincent Browne: "I got an apology that was half an apology, but it's over."

Bounding around the lobby in Murphy-Flood's hotel in Enniscorthy was her 79-year-old mother, Sheila, pacemaker and sense of humour in good working order: "I'm the fighter . . . and I hope we have a lot of fighting people behind us."