I life less ordinary

The new year started tragically with the death of Tony Gregory, one of the country’s most widely respected politicians. The 61-year-old was Ireland’s longest-serving independent TD ever, having spent almost 27 consecutive years in the Dail as a deputy.

His political career began with a wave of national publicity when he was elected to the Dail in February 1982. In what became known as the ‘Gregory Deal’, he found himself in the unique position of being able to negotiate a major capital investment in his constituency in return for agreeing to nominate Charlie Haughey as Taoiseach. After this, Gregory was rarely out of the public eye as he campaigned vigorously on his constituents’ behalf, as well as on national issues.
An iconoclast by nature, and the first TD to refuse to sport a tie in the Dail, he had little time for pomp or ceremony. But he cared deeply about the ordinary working class people he represented. He played an influential role in the anti-drugs campaign of the mid-’80s. He’ll also be remembered for protesting alongside the city centre street traders – a campaign that ultimately saw him being slung into Mountjoy Jail for two weeks.
When we met at the Dail, to conduct what he knew would be a high profile interview, it was obvious Gregory was facing into a serious illness. He had lost weight, and was wearing a baseball cap, which I presumed was to conceal the inevitable hair loss from the chemotherapy he was undergoing.
He told me that he didn’t like discussing his illness in public, and despite the fact that he was facing into the last few months of his life, refused to allow self-pity to seep into our conversation or to see himself as a victim. Instead, he was in a reflective mood and determined to set the record straight on the major events in his life.
As we sat down in a conference room in the government building called Leinster 2000, Gregory told me to hurry up with my questions as he became tired easily and reckoned that he probably wouldn’t be able to take more than 45 minutes of questioning. Instead, almost two hours later, he was still going strong, with all the energy he could muster.
A few weeks later, Tony called me. We discussed how the interview was coming along and he agreed that I could drop by the Dail again to discuss any further questions I might have. Sadly, that never happened. Near the end of our last conversation, I asked him how he was getting along with an autobiography he was contemplating penning after being approached by two publishers.
“I would love to write the book myself, but I don’t know if I have enough time left to do it on my own. I might have to talk to someone like yourself about helping me with it,” he explained.
Sadly, Gregory will never get around to writing his memoir. If any politician deserved to tell his life story, it was Tony Gregory, who repeatedly said during this interview that he wanted to “set the record straight for historical accuracy.” Well, he did that for Hot Press in this interview, in which he reflected on what was a remarkable life and political career. May his memory live on…

JASON O’TOOLE: Most pundits would say the so-called Gregory Deal was the biggest achievement of your political career.
TONY GREGORY: The media called it a deal, but I always called it a Programme for Government. However, I would say it was luck rather than an achievement. Obviously, it was one of the biggest moments [of my career]. It’s very unlikely that anybody will find themselves in that position again. It was certainly one of the main things that I look back on in my political career. But the anti-drug movement was just as important to me, as was the campaigning with the women street traders – who were being jailed every day of the week. Going to jail with them in an effort to highlight their case and, to a large degree, winning their case and getting them legal pitches and so on. So, there were a load of things that made what I was doing worthwhile.
Do you have any regrets in your political career?
If I had been in a stronger political position – a Ministerial position – at some stage I would have been in a better position to achieve things. I regret that never happened. In a way, the achievement was to get elected in the first place. Everybody said, ‘This guy is a good local activist in the North Inner City, but that’s an insufficient base to get elected to the Dail. And even if he does get elected, it’ll be a flash in the pan. He won’t get elected the second time!’ But I did have the resources, the ability and the support to sustain it and get elected in every single election since 1982. To me, that’s what makes it worthwhile – the fact that people believe in you over that long period of time. And I have great regrets about some of the people who worked very, very hard for me, who just stood outside polling stations and that, in winter campaigns. A huge number of them are dead now. (Pauses) Now, maybe the mistake was that I did stay in the Dail for too long!
Do you really think so?
I don’t know! I mean, after 26 years you do start to say, ‘Have I wasted my life at this?’ Politics is a constant thing where you’re involved almost 24 hours a day, literally, and you tend not to be involved in anything else. There are times when you look back and you forget the worthwhile moments and you say, ‘What the...?’ You know? But having said that, we are discussing this retrospectively. Ah, I don’t like concentrating on regrets. So, I’ll leave all the comments to the historians about whether my role was worthwhile or not.
It appears that politics was all consuming for you. You didn’t get married or have children. Do you regret that now?
It’s one of my big regrets, but I wouldn’t blame that on politics. I think that’s the result of one’s life experience. Politics was a contributory factor, in that you’re facing constant elections and are concentrating on other things, but it wouldn’t be true to say that because of politics I isolated myself from any sort of family life. Things just didn’t work out.
When you say “things just didn’t work out”, do you mean unrequited love?
There was a certain amount of unrequited love going way back, but I got over that a long time ago. That was in my early 20s. I met my long lost love through the UCD Republican Club. She was a student in UCD too. She was from the southside. But I won’t go into that with you! You can’t use that as the reason – it just didn’t work out. It’s as simple as that. But one of the regrets I would have as a person is that I don’t have a family. There was a time – a year or two ago – I would have said, ‘Listen, I’m not dead yet! It could still happen!’ But I couldn’t say that now...
During your last interview with Hot Press back in the mid-’80s you said that you don’t have great faith in God. I got the impression that you didn’t want to declare yourself as agnostic simply because you didn’t want to offend your older constituents, many of whom would’ve been very religious.
It’s probably true to say I had an excess of religion in the first 20 years of my life and I just haven’t been able to cope with anymore since! When I was growing up, my mother was hugely religious – as country women, in particular, were. My mother had an intense devotion to the Blessed Virgin and all the traditions of the Catholic faith. I went to the ‘Nine First Fridays’, as they called the 8 o’clock mass. I ended up going to 8 o’clock mass every day of the week. I was an altar boy. I was a member of the Legion of Mary. I wouldn’t be anti-religious in any way. I respect people’s beliefs and so on. I have to be honest and say, I don’t particularly share those beliefs now. But at the same time, I’m not the type of person who believes that I have all the answers. I don’t spend a great deal of time deliberating or contemplating or reflecting on that aspect of life. I probably had too much of it as a kid and I’ve just closed myself off from it and I just get on with day-to-day life.
Do you believe in the afterlife?
We would all like to believe that there is life after death and that heaven awaits us. Unfortunately, I believed that fervently when I was a kid. I was brought up to believe it. Reluctantly, I can’t see any logic or sense in it now. But when I’m really in desperation – like a lot of other people – about something or other I pray to my mother. Despite what I just said to you, I believe her spirit is still somewhere out there, as I know that she totally loved me. I have some sort of feeling that the intense love for your children doesn’t die – it doesn’t go away. It’s somewhere out there and, in some sense, is watching over me. I have that now. That may be a hangover from what I would call excessive religion in childhood. It may also just be an emotional response to my own love for my mother. I believe that when you love somebody so much that person never dies. They are somewhere out there forever. I would love to believe she is in heaven. But when I bring that down to logic, I have to say I just don’t have the beliefs that I was brought up to have. I don’t see any logic in any such belief.
What inspired you to get involved in politics?
As I reflect back, I never had any interest in being elected. I never had the belief that I’d be a candidate for a political party. So thinking about that question, there were a number of influences on me. The primary one being that my father was born out on the North Strand Road – and I don’t mean out on the road, now (laughs) – in 1903. Why I mention the North Strand is because it’s right in the centre of the North Inner City and is very close to O’Connell Street. And when he was 10 years-of age, the 1913 Lock Out was happening and the riots in O’Connell Street with the baton charges. Basically, when my father was 10, you had a hugely historic event like that and you then, three years later, had the 1916 Rising. After that you had the Tan War and the War of Independence. A lot of it concentrated in that area of the Northside. So, when I was a kid – there was no television in those days and very little in the way of entertainment – my father, with me on his knee, was full of these stories. At school then I had a huge interest in history. And I did history at UCD. The link between history and politics in this country is obvious. I think that was the biggest influence.
What other influences?
The second influence – which probably explains my motivation for getting involved with housing issues – would have been that when myself and my brother were very young, my parents applied to go on the Corporation’s housing list. When the flats on North Strand – the James Larkin House they’re called – were being built, my mother brought us up to Jervis Street to the Corporation’s Housing Department to put our name on the list. She was asked how many kids she had. She said, ‘The two here’. And the official said to her, ‘You better come back when you have another four or five – as you ain’t got a hope in hell!’ She said, ‘I’m 45 now, so I won’t be coming back with another four or five, unless I adopt them or something. So, I won’t be coming back’. And she didn’t come back. She didn’t get the flat.
She must have been terribly disappointed.
Between herself and my father, what they did was they saved every penny they earned to buy a house. My father worked in the docks as a casual labourer. My father was knocked off when there were no boats to unload, so my mother worked in restaurants. In the mid-’50s, when half the country was emigrating there were houses empty all over the city. My parents bought a house for 700 quid, having saved every penny of it over God knows how many previous years. So, all of those influences were there: my family’s own experiences of housing conditions and inability to get State support, combined with my father’s long history of storytelling, I think all of those things influenced me.
Which politician did you most admire?
The politician I most admired in all of that time was Seamus Costello. He was murdered at 38 years of age. I could put myself in that position rather than looking at John Bruton or Brian Cowen or Bertie Ahern or whoever, you know?
Did you get involved in politics from an early age?
I did the Leaving Cert on the 50th anniversary of the 1916 Rising and I went into university and got involved in setting up a Republican Club there. It was at a time when the Official Sinn Fein – because they hadn’t split until ’69 – were involved in the Dublin Housing Action Committee. It was a trendy thing to get involved – the Ruairi Quinns, Kevin Myers and the poor guy who was killed in a plane crash, the journalist John Feeney, people like that were in UCD at the time. That group were calling themselves SDA, Students for Democratic Action. They were by-and-large quite upper class and they liked the idea of getting involved. This, to me, was a bit of an irony in that I had grown up experiencing poor housing conditions and the difficulties of housing for families on a waiting list – never mind getting a place. So, I felt obliged to play a part in this. This was something that I’d grown up with and experienced – and here were all these yahoos, as I saw them, getting involved for a couple of years while they were students because they thought it was trendy. They probably didn’t give a damn about the actual issue.
Did you feel privileged getting into university when you came from a working class background?
The funny thing about getting to university was that I didn’t know what a university was when I was in second level school! Trinity College was, for me, a wall along Pearse Street and had the Book of Kells. It meant nothing to me. It may sound very strange now but, at that time, the privilege was getting into second-level school. The vast majority of the kids from my area either left school when they finished primary school, or went into what was called the local Tech or vocational school, or got an apprenticeship. My father would have had the same approach because everybody he worked with at the docks had their kids leave school early. That’s what he thought would happen with me. Whereas my mother, who was from Offaly, like our friend Mr Cowen, had a different experience. Rural people’s experience was that the only way out of poverty was through education. So, from the time I started in primary school my mother was preparing me – showing me how to write, getting me to practise at home and so on. She got me through primary school into the scholarship class, which was a Corporation scholarship, to O’Connell’s Schools.
It would’ve been unusual for an inner city kid like yourself to get accepted in O’Connell’s back then, as the Christian Brothers had a policy for that particular school of refusing entry to the local community. I know this because I attended the same school.
That’s correct – it was unusual. The local kids went to Saint Canice’s Primary on the North Circular Road – no local kids in the ‘50s went to O’Connell’s. To walk from my house to Canice’s you had to walk past O’Connell’s. I’d see all these fellas in their red blazers, and gold braid and red caps getting off buses and walking sedately down to O’Connell’s, while the ragtag from the local area – including myself – went up to Canice’s. Now, the Christian Brothers in both schools lived in the same house. It was segregation! Class segregation. How I ended up in O’Connell’s was there was a scholarship. It was a miserable amount of money but it made all the difference. If I didn’t get the scholarship, I was going to the Tech in Parnell Square.
What ambitions did you have during your youth?
I didn’t particularly want to teach, but my mother wanted me to be a teacher. My mother herself had almost got to the stage where she was going to train for teaching – but because they were in a large family she had to leave school and go to work at 16 years of age and earn some money for the family. In any case, I did the exam for St Pat’s in Drumcondra, oblivious to this university thing. And a Christian Brother – a very decent man – when he was talking to us in the ‘B’ class in O’Connell’s, which was the scholarship class from Saint Canice’s, about what would we do when we’d leave school, told us not to be thinking in terms of university, that it wasn’t for us. That we weren’t cut out for that – that was for a different class of person. And if we wanted to teach, apply to the training college in Drumcondra for primary teaching.
So, what eventually inspired you to apply for university?
I was told a few months before the Leaving Cert that some of the kids in O’Connell’s were going to London to work during the summer to pay for their fees in UCD, to be secondary teachers. So, I checked this out and decided to go with them to work in Wall’s ice cream factory. I did night work for three or four months of the summer. You’d earn a fair bit of money compared to what you’d get here. At the very last minute I applied for UCD to do a BA. Once you had the fee, at that time I don’t think there was a whole lot of problem getting in. That’s how I ended up doing a degree in UCD and became a secondary school teacher.
What type of character were you growing up?
In school, I was a very quiet type. I would describe myself as sort of shy. In UCD, I played no part – good, bad or indifferent. A lot of students, even then, used to go for coffee. I hadn’t got the price of coffee. That may sound strange now, but at that time it wasn’t. If I did have the price of coffee I’d be fucked if I was going to spend it on coffee! I didn’t drink at the time – I didn’t have any money to drink! To be honest, if you live in the centre of Dublin and you’re cycling to your lecture at 9am or 11am and coming home for your lunch, you had a totally different experience of university life compared to somebody coming up from Offaly or wherever. I simply went to lectures and, afterwards, went to the library to borrow books for studying.
Were you involved in any other activities in UCD?
The only other activity I was involved in were the housing campaigns and the Republican Club. We applied for recognition to the college registrar for a Republican Club at UCD and we were refused. We started a campaign then, sit downs and what not, and we got a lot of support. We occupied the academic council and had a few sit-ins and, eventually, embarrassed them into giving us recognition as a college society. It was extraordinary. One of Trinity’s most prominent societies at the time was their Republican Club, but UCD – the nationalists’ university – refused permission. Subversion! They didn’t want it, but we got it. By the time I had graduated in ’69, which again was a traumatic era in modern Irish history, the split had occurred between the Officials and the Provisionals and I joined Official Sinn Fein from UCD.
What inspired you to join Official Sinn Fein?
In my view, it was the most vibrant political organisation in Dublin. This was a social struggle – this was nothing to do with the North. Now, the North blew up in ’69 with the burning out of Nationalists in Belfast and later Bloody Sunday and everything else. And that diverted (pauses)... anyway, prior to that, Official Sinn Fein had gained a huge number of idealistic young people who wanted to change Ireland, which was a pretty dreary place at that time. We believed that we could change things through political struggle, through peaceful protests and all that sort of thing. I became very, very intensely involved in Official Sinn Fein. Seven nights a week. As soon as I left school, I was up to the office in Gardiner Place, which was my local Cumann.
Did you ever consider joining the IRA?
When I was doing my Leaving Cert they blew Nelson off the pillar. I remember going down at lunchtime, from O’Connell’s, to get a bit of the rubble. It was a very emotive time. It was the 50th anniversary of the 1916 Rising. RTÉ were running these highly emotional – or emotive – documentaries on the leaders, such as Connelly. So, myself and this other chap went up to Gardiner Place, which was the headquarters of Sinn Fein and, presumably, the IRA at the time. The guy who was there was Sean O’Cionnaith. I didn’t know who he was at that stage, but I recognised him three years later as the leading light in the Dublin Housing Action Committee. He said, ‘Hello lads. What can I do for you?’ I said, ‘We’d like to join the IRA!’ He looked at us. I said, ‘We’re serious now! We want to join the IRA!’ He said, ‘Well, I’ll take your names and your addresses and we’ll be in touch’. He took our names and addresses but he was never in touch. It was a spur of the moment thing but we were quite genuine about it. Three years later, they were happy to accept me into Official Sinn Fein. So, there you go...
Why did you eventually leave the Official Sinn Fein?
I became disillusioned when, in the early ‘70s, the North split the Officials as to whether or not to continue with the armed struggle or to abandon that completely. I had admired what we were doing. I had believed that no matter what would happen the organisation would build and expand and stay together. Instead, it was splitting into different groups and factions. I had spent too much time, effort and energy in doing the work on the ground, to play my part in building up this – what I thought was a very radical, progressive, political organisation in Dublin – and I just said, ‘Fuck it! I’m not going to waste my time and life with this sort of crap’. And I left.
Did you know Eoghan Harris during this period?
Eoghan Harris’s intervention didn’t help, I have to say. He wouldn’t join it. He wouldn’t be seen to be associated with it, but he wanted to control it. And through some of the leadership, he was let, in my opinion, have a very undue influence.
You then joined Irish Republican Socialist Party, right?
Shortly after I left Official Sinn Fein, Seamus Costello, who was vice president of Sinn Fein, was ostracised and basically shoved out of the movement. He asked me to help with his new organisation and I said, ‘Listen, it’s too much – I only try things once! I put too much into the Officials; I’m not going to do the same for another political party’. Afterwards, he just said, ‘Well, even just join. I need numbers. I need names’. Just to finish the thing for historical accuracy, as they say, I agreed to join on paper but I never got involved with the political organisation itself. I worked with Costello because he needed people to help him in all sorts of things. I worked with him until the day he died when he was murdered in 1977. I severed all connections, more or less, with any sort of political organisation then at that time. I then became involved in community organisations where I lived. There was a great tenants’ movement being built; there was an anti-motorway movement because they were going to build an eastern bypass right through the north city. And I got involved in all of these.
And how did you finally end up running for public office?
I never saw myself as a candidate – ever. When I was in Official Sinn Fein, I was out putting up posters, putting leaflets in letterboxes, going around knocking on doors asking people to vote. So, I always saw myself in that role as an organiser, as an activist – not as the person on the poster. So, when I was involved with community groups it became evident to me that the local councillors simply did not represent the interests of those communities in the inner city, which had been totally neglected for decades. And here were these people you only see or hear of them – and by the way it’s not true of politicians nowadays – at election time. When they started coming around before the 1979 Local Elections, my attitude was telling them to, ‘Fuck off! We’re the ones on the ground doing the work – and where the hell were they for the last five years?’ What I said to the people around me was, ‘Listen, what we need to do is put somebody up in this election. It’s madness – we have been campaigning against the City Council on a whole range of housing issues, maintenance issues, and we’re putting in people who don’t work with us and don’t help us. Why the hell?’
Were you confident of winning a seat?
The couple of people I said it to, said, ‘What do we know about elections? You’d put a lot of energy into it but you wouldn’t get elected...’ And I said, ‘If we put somebody up, we’ll get them elected. I’ll organise the election. I know elections inside out, back to front. I know exactly what you have to do for an election’. Eventually, they said, ‘That’s a matter for yourself. We’re not interested! We don’t think it would work’. These were activists with me. People like Mick Rafferty and Fergus McCabe. In any case, when I started talking to the actual tenants’ groups and community groups, they said, ‘Yeah! Definitely’. I decided to stand myself, if nobody else would, because I thought it was madness continuing to organise on issues that were dictated by the City Council and here was an election to the City Council and we weren’t participating! I went around the tenants’ groups and they said they’d give me 100% support and they did – they got me elected.
After this success, did you immediately set your sight on the bigger picture of running in the General Election?
When I got elected, people were then saying to me, ‘Jaysus! When the Dail election is coming up’ – they didn’t see the difference between the Dail and local elections – ‘are you going to stand?’ I said, ‘No! A Dail election is a much bigger constituency and most of the people wouldn’t have heard of me. Why would they vote for me?’ In any case, there was an election in ’81 and I reluctantly stood because I felt, ‘If I don’t stand now – when people are saying you should – there won’t be another chance for another five years. I either do it now or never do it’. For that reason more than anything else, I stood and came within 100 votes of being elected.
Were you surprised that you got that close?
It absolutely astounded me and astounded all the political commentators, who had written me off as a good, strong local candidate but not known widely enough for a Dail election, which was exactly my assessment of the situation. That was in November ’81. You must remember that an awful lot of people in the inner city didn’t vote at all at that time. A lot of people didn’t vote because the papers were saying, ‘Gregory has no hope – his votes will be deferred to different people’, and so on. And when they saw me – because I got a lot of publicity – losing by 100 and odd votes, a lot of them said to themselves, ‘Jaysus! I didn’t even bother me arse voting. If I had voted we could’ve got Gregory in’.
Thankfully for you, the Government collapsed some three months later because of Garret FitzGerald’s ludicrous decision to attempt to introduce a tax on children’s shoes...
Everybody said to me, ‘You better stand now because you’re a cert to get elected’. I stood in February ’82 and I had no problem – I even beat Michael O’Leary, who got a seat but I was a head of him and he was leader of the Labour Party! And Labour were supposedly the best thing since sliced bread. Not only did I get elected but I got elected into a balance of power situation where Fianna Fail needed one extra vote and the existing government of Fine Gael/Labour needed one extra vote. And I was the extra vote. And all three of them came to me looking to vote for them. You’ve had situations since where four or five or whatever PDs or independents are required to put a government into power. But this was a situation where only one person was required – a situation where the Taoiseach and a government were prepared to deliver a programme to me.
Can you talk me through what you remember about the actual Gregory Deal?
I met with the people that I was involved with and we drew up a list of issues that I stood for in the election. We gave them – Haughey, O’Leary and Fitzgerald – a whole list and we said, ‘What are you doing on the housing front? The unemployment front? For the disadvantaged? Education?’ Haughey came back with a big bloody document that would knock you over. I gave it back to him and said, ‘I’m not interested in big documents. I need to know what you are going to do on each of those issues and the timeframe and how much you’re going to spend’. And it was the same with Garret. O’Leary wasn’t interested; he left it to Garret. Haughey and FitzGerald eventually came back with their specific responses.
What made you trash out a deal with Haughey rather than FitzGerald?
It was clear to our group that Haughey was the only one who was actually recognising that we meant what we were saying. Haughey said he’d deliver a whole range of things. We agreed on that basis to support him. His government only lasted eight or nine months but during that short period he made every effort on the issues we’d agreed on. And quite a number of them were implemented in full. And if that Government had gone on for five years it would have been a major achievement for me. Unfortunately, it only went on for eight or nine months, but there was a lot done in that time.
However, when that Government fell and Fitzgerald came back into power, the Gregory Deal was abandoned. Did his government prevent many of your projects from going ahead?
Garret FitzGerald and the Fine Gael/Labour coalition did their best to undo a lot. For example, they wouldn’t build the school – which would have been the first secondary school in the north inner city – in Sean McDermott Street. Haughey had organised the site and had the builders ready. So, we had this big site with a sign up on it – ‘site for community school provided by Dublin City Council’ – and it remained like that for about 10 years until it was eventually built. It’s now the Larkin College.
What did you make of Haughey as a person?
When he wanted your support he was a very likeable character. He was very down to earth. He kept telling us, ‘Lads, you know I’m just down the roads from yiz! I’m from Marino. I’m a Northsider like youse!’ And he had that common touch. He could laugh. Some of them that were involved with me didn’t like him. They didn’t like his image. I didn’t give a shit. I regarded them all as gangsters. I was coming from Official Sinn Fein. I regarded all of these people in the Establishment as the ‘enemy’. But Haughey had a way about him. He was a brilliant communicator.
What was it like to negotiate with him?
He came to us looking for a meeting and I said, ‘Well, there’s going to be four or five people with me’. He said, ‘That’s no problem. There won’t be anybody with me’. That’s the way he did business. I did business in front of people. He came in and he put a big briefcase – he was quite small in stature – down on the table and said, ‘Right, lads, you know what I want’ – in other words, my vote – ‘so, what do youse want?’ We all started laughing and told him we had a list. He went down through the list of things that we had given him and he said, ‘Listen, I can do most of these but – for Jaysus sake! – I can’t nationalise the fucking banks!’ Because we had put down: nationalise the banks! ‘But,’ he said, ‘what I will do is I’ll put a levy on the banks’ – which he did. And he put an increased levy on every bank, for money into the exchequer, to do other stuff. So, we got on in that way.
Did you like each other on a personal level?
He said very complimentary things about me on a TV programme a long time after the event. I don’t know if he liked me or if he didn’t like me, but he got on with me. He never refused a meeting with me. We went in to meet him in the GUBU year. He was under tremendous pressure over this and there were moves – constantly – within the party to get him out. So, he was under huge pressure. Yet when we wanted to see him – at a drop of a hat – we’d go in. And he’d be like death warmed up because, you know, of the tension. It’d never surprise me that he was heading out for a few glasses of wine (laughs) to try and stay sane... What I’m saying to you is, he knew he needed my vote but he always behaved in the most honourable, reasonable and straight way. So, to say that he wasn’t likeable would be wrong. For me he was a very likeable character to deal with. But if he regarded you as the enemy, or if he didn’t need you or whatever, or if he regarded you as somebody who wasn’t up for the job in his own party, he could treat you publicly like shit. He treated people in front of me very badly – and they accepted it. But that’s the way he was. I wasn’t in his party, so it didn’t matter to me how he treated people in his party. What you saw is what you got. If he thought you were a bollix that’s what he said to you and that’s the word he used.
Do you think the Gregory Deal pissed off Bertie Ahern?
What pissed Ahern off about me, I think – and I’ve never spoken to him about it – was when Haughey asked me to meet him, I said, ‘I’ll have four or five people with me’ and Haughey said to me, ‘That’s fine – you can have as many as you like. I’ll have nobody with me. Where is your office?’ I said, ’20 Summerhill Parade’. He said, ‘Ah, sure, Bertie will drop me down. He’ll show me where it is’. That’s exactly what happened; Bertie dropped him down – but it was only dropping him down. And whatever problems there were with Ahern not being involved with the thing... now I’ve no doubt Haughey probably went out to Ahern and said, ‘Ah, that fucker Gregory didn’t want you in there’, or something, you know? I don’t know whether he did or he didn’t, but it wouldn’t surprise me because that’s the way he went on.
So, you believe that Bertie Ahern didn’t like the fact that he was left out the equation?
I think Ahern was peeved that Haughey was dealing with me by himself. And all of this stuff was getting front page headlines: ‘What Gregory’s Doing for Dublin Central.’ Meanwhile, the government TD, the Chief Whip, is getting no coverage. So, that’s bound to piss anybody off. And it undoubtedly pissed Ahern off big time. And he didn’t forgive. But it wasn’t my doing. I didn’t give a shit who was involved – my interest was getting the houses built. I didn’t give a damn if Haughey announced that the Fianna Fail government were building these houses with the support of Gregory and the local Fianna Fail man, Bertie Ahern. It never even arose. But the media were there; the media wanted to know what was in my deal; I told them and they covered it as if it was all me. And Haughey never said anything else. So, that may have been the root of pissing off Bertie.
I believe dirty tricks were played against you in the constituency during subsequent elections?
I was phoned at four am with people reading prayers over the thing as if I was about to die or something! I woke up at four o’clock in the morning and there was this real weird voice, ‘In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Santi...’ Some sort of Latin thing as if I was at my funeral! All this sort of thing to scare you. Others ringing you up, saying, ‘Haughey’s bought you a house out in Clontarf!’ and this sort of thing. This was occurring at 3 or 4 o’clock in the morning and I eventually had to take my number out of the phone book.
Did you think it was a threat?
I don’t know what it was! It was just to unnerve me. To put me under pressure. They knew I was under huge pressure – I’d never been elected and suddenly I’m elected into the very centre of Dublin. As an independent TD, I’ve been elected longer than anybody else. The longer you go on, the less likely it is to happen. You become accepted, that you’re going to get in. I don’t think I’ve had any serious tricks played on me in recent times. Going back, I know there was an effort made to smear me on the night of the election in 1981. Posters went up at 8 o’clock on the morning of the election, saying, ‘Vote for the H Block’s Candidate! Vote Gregory Number One!’
Who put these up?
I have always believed that the only people with the manpower to do it – at that hour when all of us were concentrated on doing our own posters and our own work – were Ahern and his team. It was in his interest to undermine me. That’s my view. While that happened in 1981, I put the word out, ‘Listen, the next election if anybody goes around putting smear posters up about me or anything else about me, I’ll be going around and I’ll have a hatchet in the car!’ I said that to a lot of people at the time.
Did you really have a hatchet?
I did have a hatchet, but I had the hatchet for other reasons! There were feuds going on that I was afraid people might mix me up with, because of my background in the Officials and the IRSP and that. But in any case, Ahern took all of that as the cut and thrust of politics. At the time, his biggest problem was Fianna Fail votes. To him George Colley was no problem at all. He was able undermine Colley. When the people were standing outside the polling stations, from the different parties and that, he didn’t get his crowd to kick my crowd out of the way, but he got his people to kick Colley’s canvassers out of the way. Away from the main entrance and that sort of thing – ‘This is Bertie’s spot!’
Do you really think Bertie’s camp gave Colley a going over?
I know Ahern’s crowd gave Colley’s crowd a rough time. Big time. What did happen was Ahern was put from Finglas into a new constituency – therefore he felt vulnerable at that time. He was tufted out of Finglas by Jim Tunney who didn’t want this little whippersnapper taking over his constituency. And he was dumped out on top of George Colley. And as we know, unfortunately, Colley died of a heart attack. I’m not suggesting that there was any connection between the two now or anything – but! At that time, the only rivalries that existed within politics were within political parties. There was no rivalry between Ahern and Michael O’Leary in Dublin Central. O’Leary was after the Labour vote and Ahern was after the Fianna Fail vote, so his only rival was Colley. And I presume Ahern did what he’s been doing ever since – he did local polls to tell him who was strong in different areas and who he would need to make inroads into.
You were seen as vehemently anti-drugs...
(Laughs) I’m portrayed as this anti-drugs person, but when we were involved in 1980s (in the campaign) there was the odd bit of hash going around in the inner city. It certainly wasn’t as widespread as it is now; people didn’t have the money in any case. And there would have been LSD. I was afraid of LSD because I heard this thing took over your mind completely. And I never liked things that took you over completely. I mean if you’re anti-drug, I wouldn’t be able to have my glass of wine or even drink coffee or whatever, because they’re all drugs. I think alcohol in the inner city, unfortunately, did far more damage than even heroin, never mind anything as almost irrelevant as hash. So, it was not an anti-drugs thing. It was an anti-heroin campaign.
Do you think marijuana should be legalised?
The latest research is saying that marijuana is very carcinogenic and that there is a big link with cancer. I have never heard a logical argument for legalising cannabis. I’ve heard logical arguments for giving pure heroin to extremely, acutely addicted people for whom no other treatment programme works, as well as giving them clean needles and even heroin. This would prevent them getting Aids. I’ve been at projects in Switzerland where they’ve done that. They have little clean offices that are medically supervised and so on. There is logic for all these sort of things. I can see the arguments from people who say, ‘You’ll never defeat it and crime will escalate and so on’. But, you know, legalising any drug I presume means you can walk in and buy it. I think that just compounds the problem. As far as I’m concerned, heroin is a very negative, damaging drug. The idea of making it legal is crazy. If you legalise it an awful lot more people will buy it – and it’s a highly addictive drug.
Can you take me back to how the anti-drugs campaign started?
That was spontaneous community response to heroin – not to drugs, but to heroin – in an area that had never experienced anything like that, but had every other sort of problem: we had massive unemployment, awful housing conditions, no maintenance from the local authority, very few getting on beyond primary education. And then suddenly there were these people – from within the community! – giving 12-year-olds heroin! And they’re mainlining heroin. And people living within the area, both in the ‘80s and ‘90s – a coach in the local boxing club, a footballer, an athlete who were all known and respected for their sporting activities within the community – were supplying heroin. Destroying the health of kids in the area – killing kids! In that sort of scenario there’s only one position you can take and that is we have to attend to this and use whatever resources we have against it. And there was a spontaneous community thing of marching on these people, on marching to their doors, of naming them publicly and so on.
Did you ever mistakenly target an innocent person during this anti-drugs campaign?
No and only because we were told at the very start that that was one of the reasons why we shouldn’t go down this road. They were saying, ‘This would be vigilantism and they’ll make mistakes and people will name people for personal grudges and so on’. And we said, ‘We’re not idiots, we’re conscious of all of that. We will lead this movement in the North Inner City and we will direct it. And it won’t be used to sort out personal grudges or anything else. If we go down this road, we make sure that’s one of the things that we don’t do’. And we didn’t. I was never– or the organisation of the community group – was never involved doing anything untoward. We checked out who we were going to march on. Word would spread into the march that we’re going to so-and-so and everybody would say, ‘We know he’s dealing – sure we’re living in these flats, so we know what’s going on’. We held the meetings in churches and bingo halls and there were literally thousands of people turning up at these meetings. The smallest would be in hundreds. It was the entire community. It was the relatives of some of these people who were getting up and saying, ‘My family, my mother, my father disown’ – whoever it was – ‘for bringing heroin into this area’.
But violence was used.
There was the occasional thing. I remember a huge, very heavy, wooden plank being thrown from a top balcony right down onto a march. If it had hit anybody it would have killed them. I remember a guy coming out with a sword! A heroin dealer coming out with a sword and charging straight at us. Now, he was very foolish – there was about a thousand people at the march! He sort of got a few flagstaffs and that up his arse almost, as he headed back to his house. There would have been more serious things than that, but there was never any real casualty or anything like that. It was basically a community-driven campaign; it was the use of community pressure against individuals from within their own community.
Did you ever fear for your own life?
There was a lot of people putting themselves at risk, so I wasn’t the only one. At one stage, before Veronica Guerin was murdered, I was called in by the Superintendant in Fitzgibbon Street to say that the Garda had, what they called low level intelligence – I always loved that phrase ‘low life intelligence’ (laughs) – that somebody was going to have a go at shooting me. I was advised that I should take precautions at home. I said, ‘Listen, I live in the area; I work in the area; I have a clinic in the area; I’m in a particular office every Thursday night – if somebody wants to kill me (laughs nervously as he reflects) taking precautions down at me house isn’t going to stop them!’ When I heard people threatening to ‘burn me gaff,’ as they’d say – people that say that ain’t going to do it; it’s the fuckers that say nothing that you need to watch, you know? But the result of Veronica Guerin being murdered was that that was definitely the end – nobody else was going to be murdered because there was such a huge public and State response to that really terrible thing of blowing a young woman apart, that they were never going to try that again on any public person.
What did you think of the portrayal of yourself in the Veronica Guerin movie?
I thought the portrayal of everybody else was spot on, but I felt they got me slightly wrong. That’s what most people say to me. Garrett Keogh is a very good actor, but he’s not me. Whereas the guy who played Traynor and the guy who played Gilligan and the woman who was Veronica Guerin were brilliant. They looked like and were like the people they were acting. The guy who was acting me – with a tie! – and he was quite a big guy and all the rest; he didn’t look like me, he didn’t seem like me, he didn’t sound like me. But the words they used were pretty accurate, particularly with the scene in the Independent. I never went into the printers, I rang him (Aengus Fanning) on the phone, but they wanted to dramatise it in the film. But saying that, it wouldn’t be unusual because the printers at the time were still down in Abbey Street, which was only down the road from me, so it wouldn’t deter me. I’d often gone in – in years before that – with a press release about some community event. So, it wasn’t beyond credibility – but it didn’t happen.
It seems that the public have an almost insatiable taste for crime stories. What do you think of the media’s depiction of criminals?
There is a responsibility on the media to paint them in their true light rather than – as has happened in some incidents – where they are glamorised. I think, by and large, the media behaves reasonably responsibly. They have to write about these people – they exist – and they should be exposed for what they are. But the media should always be conscious of not glamorising them because, inevitably, if you paint some heroin dealer as having a luxurious lifestyle with a villa in Spain… if you don’t do that in a responsible way you’ll have kids from disadvantaged areas who’ll say, ‘I want a villa in Spain and your man’s able to do it – and I’m going to do it. You don’t get caught. It’s easy to do!’ So, it has to be balanced with coverage that will show what impact that individual is having on his own people and his own community by dishing out heroin. It’s a difficult one. But I remember when heroin dealers were driving around in BMWs and buying houses in my own area and nothing was being done about it. And nothing was being written about them. And the kids in the inner city saw that and saw that they weren’t being caught, so they saw this as an easy way to make money. So, the criminals were being glamorised by their activities locally and they were having that hugely negative impact on young kids who then got involved.
I suppose Paul Williams is almost synonymous at this stage with crime reporting in Ireland....
I don’t like a lot of the stuff that he writes nowadays. He made a series there about the Criminal Assets Bureau (CAB), which I thought was the greatest load of crap I’ve ever seen, where he interviewed the very people who had resisted setting up CAB, such as the Garda Commissioner; the politicians, including Ruairi Quinn, who was Minister for Finance when Veronica Guerin was murdered, who had failed to do anything about setting up a Criminal Assets Bureau at the time and was panicking to doing it after she was murdered. And he interviewed all these people, talking about how wonderful CAB was – and these were the very people who had done nothing to bring it about. So, I don’t like that distortion of historically important – socially important – developments. I think he distorted (it) because he has his own agenda. I would’ve had differences with him over that sort of thing. But I think he’s probably been the most courageous journalist in the whole drugs thing. I rate him way beyond Veronica Guerin or anybody else. He was naming people way before anybody else. And he consistently does it. He’s had threats on his life. I would have respect for him on one level.
There was a story floating around some years back that you had an unusual connection with the Monk?
I know Hutch to talk to, but there has never been any connection with me. After the media said he robbed – well, assuming that it was him! – the Brinks Allied, I was asked by RTÉ’s This Week programme what did I think of the robbery. I said, ‘it was obviously a very well planned, sophisticated robbery. There’s no question about that’. I also said that what was in the media about Hutch was wrong – that, as far as I knew from local knowledge, he was not involved in drugs. And I hoped that was the case. And as far as I knew that – because he was not involved in drugs – the money from Brink Allied would not be used to buy drugs – because that’s what the media was saying. I got this call from a well known journalist – I won’t say his name, but I’ll tell you when you switch off that tape recorder – in the Evening Herald at about 8.30am the next morning. He said, ‘Tony, we have word in here – we’re going to run with a story on the front page that Hutch is financing your election campaign!’ What he wanted me to do was deny it.
Why?
I remember David Norris saying to me afterwards about a different thing he was asked and he immediately denied it. So, what did they do? They published: ‘Norris Denies This...’ If I had denied the allegation your man was making – for which there was no basis at all – the Herald’s front page would’ve been: ‘Gregory Denies That The Monk Funds His Campaign!’ It’s that sort of smart-aleck – I won’t even call it gutter – journalism because I liked the guy who was actually ringing me, which was the strange thing about it. He probably half-believed the thing, I don’t know, but it’s that type of smart-alecky stuff that gives tabloids a bad name. I’ve only had one or two bad experiences with newspapers, so by-and-large my experiences with journalists have been very good. I have some very good friends who are journalists, here in Leinster House, and some who work for Independent newspapers!
So what happened next?
I said, ‘Well, it’s like this...what time will the Herald be on the street?’ He said, ‘About 12 o’clock’. And I said, ‘I’ll be down in O’Connell Street and I’ll get one of the first copies out; and by, say, 3 o’clock you’ll have a correspondence with my solicitor – suing you, the Evening Herald, Independent Newspapers, Tony O’Reilly, and everybody else!’ He said, ‘Oh! Hang on – I’ll ring you back!’ Ten minutes later, he rings me back and he says, ‘We’re dropping that story! You needn’t worry about it!’ (Laughs.) I said, ‘I wasn’t worried about it at all. I was going to make a packet out of it!’ (laughs)