MEMOIR: All Kinds of Everything By Dana Rosemary Scallon :Dana Rosemary Scallon exposes her many contradictions but still keeps herself under wraps, writes Liz McManus.
The year is 1970. The place is the Castle Bar in Derry. I'm crammed in the middle of a heaving mass of people. Grown men and women are bellowing at a television high up in the corner. Onscreen a slip of a young girl with porcelain skin and long black hair is crooning All Kinds of Everything. Both she and the words are as sweet as spun sugar and as wholesome as currant cake.
On that night Rosemary Scallon, Bogsider, became Dana, Eurovision winner, and the pub nearly burst with pride. But no-one was surprised. The crowd took it as their due. Why wouldn't the wee lassie win? After all, didn't she come from Derry, a city renowned for its music?
In Free Derry anything was possible then.
All the same, I don't believe anyone in that drunken happy crowd would have believed the truth if it had been told to them, the truth being that the pretty young girl they were cheering in 1970 would develop into a powerful iconic figure in the national politics of the Irish Republic.
This was at a time when Bernadette Devlin was making it on to the front pages of newspapers worldwide. She espoused a leftwing perspective in tune with the times. Few would have expected that Bernadette of the barricades, as a political force, would fade out so fast as a political force but times change. Instead, an 18-year-old singer from the Bogside morphed into a doughty campaigner from the opposite end of the political spectrum.
Winning the Eurovision Song Contest seemed to be the likely pinnacle of a career that had only just begun. What followed, however, was an odyssey that deserves a book to be written about it. Although Dana's autobiography All Kinds of Everything covers the miles travelled, this reader was left with an impression that the writer has held back too much. Dana Rosemary Scanlon is both a unique political phenomenon and a woman of courage, yet there is a self-protectiveness about this book that disappoints.
IT ALL BEGAN in Derry, growing up in a working-class household where getting a second-level education demanded sacrifice. Rosemary Scanlon was conscious from an early age of a responsibility to contribute through hard work and determination. She didn't let the outside world impinge. When all hell broke loose in 1969 in the streets of the Bogside, the prudent Scanlon family were spectators not participants. They were living in Rossville Flats which, at the time, became the epicentre of a warfare that raged between the local youths on the roof of the flats raining petrol bombs down into the ranks of RUC on the ground. The family chose to watch the action through the windows rather than step outside.
Her musical career took off so successfully that when she won Eurovision, Tom McGrath of RTÉ wailed at her, "How dare you win! We can't afford it!"
She met singers and performers in her subsequent career. Gilbert O'Sullivan was "thoughtful and considerate"; Dusty Springfield was "very good to me"; Les Dawson was "a firm favourite" . . . the blandness cries out unrequited for some meaty backstage gossip but, sadly, none materialises.
ONCE SHE WAS married and had children, Dana moved to Alabama and become actively involved in the Christian music industry. Life settled into a pattern, but in 1997 she took a new direction which rattled the political establishment in Ireland. The book is coy to the point of disingenuousness about any support she may have received from the Christian Right in America and the anti-abortion movement at home. Her presidential campaign is depicted as largely a matter of driving around the country in a car with her relatives on board. A campaign described vaguely as paid for by small donations from Ireland and run by her band of volunteers.
IT IS TRUE she got support from strange quarters; the late Jonathan Philbin Bowman threw his weight behind her. There were those who didn't agree with her politics but simply wanted to reward the chutzpah she displayed when she hunted down a nomination from county councils. Shane Ross, who was a Fine Gael member of Wicklow Co Council took great delight "as a Southern Prod supporting a traditional Derry Taig". He wrote in his column: "The columnists of the politically correct organs sneered at Dana. They declared her a political pygmy . . . We have to settle for a self-made millionairess who defied the ridicule of The Irish Times, who stuck to her beliefs, however unfashionable, and who unlocked the stranglehold held over the presidency by Ireland's political fixers."
In the end she won a remarkable 13.8 per cent of the national vote and came third in that contest. It was, in my view, her finest hour. As Philbin Bowman told her, even if she wasn't a president, she was a precedent.
In the end the contradictions that make up Dana Rosemary Scanlon remain largely unexplained; the champion who espoused family values and yet spent much time away from her family campaigning for those values; the anti-abortion advocate who stood up to the bishops and the Pro Life movement, although they had been her springboard into the European Parliament; the staunch Catholic who invited Dr Ian Paisley, that arch-enemy of the Pope, to launch her autobiography. All kinds of everything it ain't, but it's still a good read.
Liz McManus TD is Labour Party Spokesperson on Communications, Energy and Natural Resources
Gill & Macmillan, 277pp. €22.99