* Senator Norris first openly gay candidate for ceremonial role
* Eurovision winner Dana earns second run at presidency
* Norris nomination blow to ex-IRA commander McGuinness (Adds Norris nomination)
DUBLIN, Sept 27 (Reuters) - A gay senator and a former Eurovision Song Contest winner secured nominations on Tuesday to run for the presidency of Ireland, joining a motley field that also contains a former Irish Republican Army (IRA) guerrilla commander.
Senator David Norris, the frontrunner and first openly gay candidate for the largely ceremonial role in predominantly Roman Catholic Ireland, received the necessary backing of four local councils to add his name to the Oct. 27 ballot.
Homosexuality was decriminalised in Ireland in 1993, much later than in many other European countries, following a campaign led by Norris, while civil partnership for same-sex couples was only legalised last year.
"Many, many thanks to the Councillors of Dublin City Council! I have secured the last nomination needed!," Norris, who had abandoned the race for president just last month, wrote on his Twitter page.
The senator, who has topped almost every opinion poll, pulled out of the race after it emerged he had pleaded for clemency for a friend convicted of statutory rape.
Norris's admission that he had asked an Israeli judge to be lenient towards his Israeli former partner over a sexual relationship with a 15-year-old Palestinian boy came after the re-publication of comments he made in 2002 defending the Ancient Greek attitude to paedophilia.
The controversy led several former supporters to call for him to step aside but the continued popularity of Norris, a charismatic scholar of Irish writer James Joyce, triggered a rethink and he decided to rejoin the race.
Norris's nomination may hurt the chances of former IRA commander turned Northern Irish deputy first minister Martin McGuinness, whose candidacy has electrified an otherwise dull campaign and shocked the Irish political establishment.
Although he played a key role in Northern Ireland in ending the IRA's 30-year campaign of violence, Sinn Fein's McGuinness is a controversial figure in the Republic where a government minister last week criticised his "exotic background".
A poll on Sunday put McGuinness in third place behind Norris and second-placed Michael D. Higgins of junior coalition party Labour. However former culture minister Higgins remains the favourite to win the race, according to bookmaker Paddy Power.
Paddy Power rate Norris's fellow independent candidate, Eurovision winner Dana Rosemary Scallon as the joint least likely to win the vote despite running for president in 1997 and coming third in a field of five with 14 percent of the vote.
The one-time religious television chat show host, better known simply as Dana, triumphed at the song contest as a teenager in 1970 and served a term as member of the European parliament 30 years later.
A devout Catholic and vehement opponent of abortion, Dana won the support of councillors in the county of Offaly to seal her nomination on Tuesday, the councillor who proposed her inclusion in the poll told Reuters. (Reporting by Padraic Halpin; Editing by Louise Ireland)
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