Tony Gregory

Tony Gregory (5 December 1947 – 2 January 2009) was an Irish independent politician and Teachta Dála (TD) for the Dublin Central constituency from 1982 until his death in 2009, a span of almost twenty-seven years that made him the longest-serving independent TD in the history of the state. A former member of Sinn Féin, the IRA and the Irish Republican Socialist Party, Gregory built his political career on community activism in Dublin's north inner city, an area marked by poverty, poor housing and, from the early 1980s, heroin addiction.

On his election to Dáil Éireann in February 1982, Gregory found himself holding the balance of power in a hung Dáil and negotiated a package of investment for his constituency, estimated at the time to be worth around £100 million, in return for supporting Fianna Fáil leader Charles Haughey as Taoiseach. The agreement became known as the "Gregory Deal", although Gregory himself preferred to call it a "programme for government".

Beyond the deal, Gregory was known for campaigning on behalf of Dublin's female street traders, for which he was jailed for two weeks in 1986, and for his prominent role in the community response to Dublin's heroin epidemic during the 1980s and 1990s, including his support for the Concerned Parents Against Drugs movement. He never held ministerial or government office, but was widely described, in the words of Dublin City Council historian in residence Mary Muldowney, as a "true working class hero".

Gregory died on 2 January 2009 in St Francis Hospice, Raheny, after a battle of over a year with stomach cancer. His long-time election agent, Maureen O'Sullivan, succeeded him at the resulting by-election.

Early life Gregory was born in Ballybough on Dublin's Northside on 5 December 1947, the second child of Anthony Gregory and Ellen Gregory . Having saved £700 between them, his parents were eventually able to buy a house at Sackville Gardens, near the Royal Canal, where Gregory lived for the rest of his life.

After completing his Leaving Certificate in 1966, Gregory secured a place on a Bachelor of Arts course studying Irish and history at University College Dublin (UCD), working a summer at the Wall's ice cream factory in Acton, London to help pay his way. and remained deeply suspicious of the Officials in their later incarnation as the Workers' Party (WP). He was briefly a member of the Socialist Labour Party (SLP), founded in 1977 by Noel Browne and Matt Merrigan, but grew disillusioned with factional squabbling within the party and turned instead to local community politics. Gregory's negotiating team consisted of himself, community workers Mick Rafferty and Fergus McCabe, and his brother Noel Gregory. Garret FitzGerald, by contrast, did not meet Gregory until a week before the Dáil vote for Taoiseach, and the Fine Gael leader's team was, in the assessment of Gregory's negotiators, slower to grasp the detail of what was being sought. The agreement, immediately dubbed the "Gregory Deal" by the media, though Gregory maintained its proper title was a "programme for government", committed the incoming Fianna Fáil government to a wide range of measures.

Writing in Magill the following month, journalist Pat Brennan cautioned that the agreement was "a last minute deal, not a plan that was studied, costed, discussed, and finalised", and observed that it remained unclear who would ultimately pay for it or whether it represented a genuine transfer of resources to the poor rather than simply additional state borrowing. Although Gregory was reviled in certain quarters for effectively holding a government to ransom, his uncompromising commitment to the poor was widely admired. In 1982 a report revealed that 10% of 15 to 24-year-olds in the north inner city had used heroin at least once. The spread of heroin also drove a sharp rise in petty crime. Gregory confronted both the government and senior gardaí over what he regarded as an inadequate response, and he co-ordinated with the Concerned Parents Against Drugs (CPAD) movement from 1983, defending it against accusations by government ministers Michael Noonan and Barry Desmond that it was a front for the Provisional IRA. According to a later account by historian Brian Hanley reviewing André Lyder's memoir of the movement, Gregory and Sinn Féin councillor Christy Burke were, initially, the only local political figures in the north inner city to give the campaign their support, largely because both men lived in the areas worst affected and shared the same concerns as their neighbours. During a public meeting held by the group, Gregory told a man he identified as an associate of the Dunne family that, if he had any decency left, he should "walk straight into the Liffey and drown himself".

In a 2009 interview, Gregory rejected the notion that he was simply "anti-drugs", noting that alcohol, in his assessment, had done more damage in the inner city than heroin; his campaign, he said, had specifically been an "anti-heroin campaign", driven by the sight of dealers deliberately supplying heroin to children as young as twelve within their own community.

Gregory was also critical of media coverage that, in his view, glamorised drug dealers, arguing that showing criminals enjoying a "luxurious lifestyle" without corresponding coverage of the harm they inflicted encouraged disadvantaged young people to see dealing as an easy route to wealth. Gregory and Costello were subsequently charged with assault and obstruction, and Burke with insulting and threatening behaviour; Gregory told the crowd that gathered afterwards that traders had "a constitutional right to earn a living to rear your families and to provide for your families". On his release, Gregory criticised Minister for Justice Michael Noonan for refusing to allow him a day's temporary release to attend a Dáil debate on teachers' pay. O'Sullivan also wrote that Gregory abhorred the tendency of politicians to place party interest ahead of the interests of the communities that elected them. At the time of his death, Gregory was in a long-term relationship with Annette Dolan. Taoiseach Brian Cowen said Gregory had "served his community of the inner city at a national level with great dedication and distinction for over a quarter of a century", while former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, Gregory's long-time constituency rival, described him as a politician who "gave total commitment to his constituents and made an undoubted difference to the city he loved".

A white and blue Starry Plough flag, associated with the socialist variant of Irish Republicanism, was draped on Gregory's coffin during his burial. Around 600 mourners attended Gregory's funeral Mass at St Agatha's Church on North William Street on 7 January 2009, where he had once served as an altar boy. The Mass was celebrated by family friend Fr Piaras Ó Duill and concelebrated by Auxiliary Bishop of Dublin Eamon Walsh; the homily was delivered by Fr Peter McVerry, who described Gregory as a man who had "made open-necked shirts respectable" and who told the congregation that "politicians come and go... but Tony Gregory will not be forgotten".

Earlier in his illness, Gregory had complained successfully to the Press Council of Ireland after the Evening Herald published a story about his diagnosis and sent a reporter to his Ballybough home to speak to his brother Noel; the Council found the newspaper had breached his privacy "at a time of distress and shock", a ruling that was upheld on appeal.

By-election

Colleagues of Gregory supported his long-time election agent, Dublin City Councillor Maureen O'Sullivan, at the Dublin Central by-election in June 2009. O'Sullivan won the seat, taking 7,639 first-preference votes (26.9%) and reaching 13,739 votes by the seventh count, just short of the quota. Fianna Fáil's vote in the constituency collapsed, with candidate Maurice Ahern, brother of Bertie Ahern, securing just 12.25%, compared with the 39% his brother had won as sitting Taoiseach at the 2007 general election. Reviewing the biography in The Irish Times, journalist Deaglán de Bréadún described Gregory as Ireland's own "Jesse Jackson", drawing on the book's citation of a line from the film The Commitments describing north Dublin's working class as "the blacks of Dublin", and argued that it would be inaccurate to portray Gregory as a mere clientelist politician given his lifelong socialism. De Bréadún noted, however, that the book said relatively little about Gregory's relationship with his father or the full circumstances of his IRA membership as a young man, and suggested a definitive biography had yet to be written.

In August 2019, an exhibition on Gregory's life was unveiled at Charleville Mall Library, on his old patch of the North Strand, with fellow activists Mick Rafferty and Fergus McCabe present alongside his brother Noel. Rafferty, recalling Gregory's consistency compared with more "clientelistic" politicians, compared a subsequent 2016 government-commissioned investment plan for the north inner city, the Mulvey report, to "the Gregory deal for slow learners". Mary Muldowney, Dublin City Council's historian in residence for the area, described Gregory at the exhibition's opening as a "true working class hero" and argued that the history of ordinary people such as those he represented had "as much value" in the historical record as that of any government minister.

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