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". Much of the deal went unfulfilled after Haughey's government collapsed within the year, but the episode established Gregory as a national figure and helped secure his re-election at every subsequent general election until his death.
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 was the first TD to refuse to wear a tie in the Dáil chamber, a small act of defiance that drew considerable public attention at the time. 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. He never married, though he was in a long-term relationship with Annette Dolan at the time of his death. His long-time election agent, Maureen O'Sullivan, succeeded him at the resulting by-election.
Gregory was born in Ballybough on Dublin's Northside on 5 December 1947, the second child of Anthony Gregory and Ellen Gregory (née Judge). His father, a native of the North Strand area of Dublin, had run a small shoemaker's business in Ballybough before, unable to make a living from it, becoming a warehouseman on Dublin docks, where he experienced regular periods of unemployment. His mother, born in 1904 in Croghan, County Offaly, was the daughter of small farmers and had moved to Dublin to work as a waitress after the mid-1920s. The couple married in 1944 and lived in a one-room flat in Ballybough, on Charleville Street, into the 1950s.
The family applied to be housed by Dublin Corporation but were refused, with an official reportedly telling his mother to "come back when you have six [children]". The incident left a lasting impression on Gregory, who referred to it in interviews throughout his life, and he dated much of his political motivation to his parents' experience of housing insecurity. 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.
Gregory later reflected that this background, combined with growing up in the centre of Dublin, had given him "a very acute sense of the social inequality that exists in this country", and said the experience had left him with a bitterness he felt he never entirely lost. He was especially close to his mother and was deeply affected by her death in 1969, at times saying in later life that he still prayed to her memory. He also spent childhood holidays at his mother's family home near Croghan Hill in Offaly, and retained a lifelong fondness for the countryside. His mother was a devout Catholic, and Gregory served as an altar boy and was a member of the Legion of Mary as a teenager, though he described himself in later interviews as having little faith left, saying he had "an excess of religion" in the first twenty years of his life.
Gregory attended a pre-school run by the Loreto sisters on Hill Street, then a school on North William Street run by the Sisters of Charity, before completing his primary education at St Canice's Christian Brothers School on the North Circular Road. At his mother's prompting, he sat a Dublin Corporation scholarship examination for a place in secondary school, recalling later that his primary teachers offered him little encouragement, on the assumption that local children who progressed to second level would attend a technical school rather than a grammar school. He won the scholarship and enrolled at the Christian Brothers' O'Connell School on North Richmond Street in September 1960, one of very few children from his immediate area to do so at that time.
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. He later recalled feeling out of step with most of his fellow students, saying he "took no part in college social life" and often cycled home for lunch rather than socialise, in part for want of money. It was nonetheless at UCD that he became politically active, helping to found a Republican Club there despite opposition from the college authorities, and becoming involved with the Dublin Housing Action Committee.
After graduating with his BA in 1969, Gregory completed a Higher Diploma in Education and qualified as a secondary school teacher in 1970. He taught for a period at a vocational school on Great Denmark Street during his diploma year, before working at Coláiste Mhuire on Parnell Square and then Synge Street CBS. From the early 1970s until his election to the Dáil in 1982, he taught history and French through Irish at Coláiste Eoin, a secondary school in Stillorgan, where his students included John Crown, Colm Mac Eochaidh, Aengus Ó Snodaigh and musician Liam Ó Maonlaí. Former pupils praised his ability to make history vivid, noting his preference for academic texts, such as F. S. L. Lyons's Ireland since the Famine, over standard classroom textbooks.
Sinn Féin, the IRA and the IRSP
Gregory became involved in republican politics during the 1960s, joining Sinn Féin and the IRA. By his own later account, he had called to the Sinn Féin offices at Gardiner Place around the time of the fiftieth anniversary of the 1916 Rising, seeking to join the IRA, and was formally recruited into Official Sinn Féin only after he graduated from UCD in 1969. In UCD he helped found the UCD Republican Club, which claimed some sixty-four members by November 1968, and became involved with the Dublin Housing Action Committee. Within the movement he was a strong supporter of Wicklow republican Seamus Costello, later describing Costello as the politician he most admired in his lifetime. Costello, a member of Wicklow County Council, emphasised involvement in local politics and opposed abstentionism. Gregory sided with the Officials in the 1970 split within Sinn Féin, remaining a member of Official Sinn Féin and the Official IRA until 1973, and serving on the party's education committee in Dublin as well as education officer for his IRA unit.
Despite having a promising future within the party, Gregory resigned in 1972, citing frustration with ideological infighting. He later stated that "everything they had espoused when I joined they were busily in the process of getting rid of". When his mentor Costello was expelled from the Officials and went on to found the Irish Republican Socialist Party (IRSP) in 1974, Gregory supported him and was briefly involved with the new organisation, though he later said in a Hot Press interview, published after his death, that he had "agreed to join on paper, but had never got involved with the political organisation itself". Costello's assassination in 1977, at the hands of the Official IRA, had a deep effect on Gregory, who later said Costello had been "the greatest loss that the left has ever suffered in this country since Connolly and the others were killed". Gregory left the IRSP after Costello's death, 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.