By Joe Higgins: from The Socialist, January 2009
The recent death of Tony Gregory was greeted with great sadness throughout the country. He had been a Dail Deputy for Dublin North Central for 27 years and, aged just 61, died a little over a year after being diagnosed with cancer.
From the time I was first elected to the Dail in 1997, I worked closely with Tony Gregory. During my second five year term there were sufficient independent, Green Party and Sinn Fein deputies to set up a Technical Group under Dail rules. As the name suggests, this was a mere technical arrangement implying no political agreement, but which gave all in the group speaking and other rights similar to the main political parties.
Tony Gregory was elected as Convenor of the subgroup comprising independent deputies and myself. At that time a new arrangement was put in place whereby the Leaders of the opposition parties could ask a question of the Taoiseach without notice on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, Since this meant that the most recent and significant issues in society could be raised, this part of the Dail business became one of the most publicised.
Tony Gregory proposed that I should act as ‘Leader’ for the purposes of these questions and supported me in that role for the next five years. It was an invaluable platform from which to challenge the Fianna Fail/Progressive Government on its right wing, neoliberal policies and to highlight workers’ and community struggles. For example we were able to give a big political impetus to the struggle of the Gama workers through challenging the then Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, and forcing the Government to be procative in putting pressure on the Gama bosses.
Tony Gregory was born in Dublin’s inner city and was brought up in conditions of acute poverty. Throughout his life he remained loyal to his working class roots. In the 1980s he was a leading figure in helping to mobilise working class communities against the scourge of heroin pushing and addiction. More recently he actively supported the struggle of the people of Rossport against the Shell corporation. He supported the call for the nationalisation of Corrib gas. In 2003 just weeks before the US/British invasion of Iraq, he moved a comprehensive motion in the Dail which we jointly wrote, opposing that impending imperialist invasion.
Tony Gregory began his political activism as member of the IRSP but subsequently moved to an independent Left position. He always regarded himself as a convinced socialist.
We profoundly differed with Tony in his belief that in a balance of power situation, the Left should temporarily support one or other of the capitalist parties in government in order to extract significant concessions for working class communities. He became famous for doing this with the so called Gregory Deal in 1982. We advocate the building of a mass, independent Left alternative instead and through mass mobilisation forcing concessions out of the government of the day while working for a Left majority government. Tony, however, arrived at his position from a genuine desire to transform the inner city rather than in pursuit of squalid personal privileges.
Before he died Tony asked his closest confidantes that I would be requested to give the graveside oration at his funeral. It was a major privilege to do so. I finished my address to some hundreds of his devoted family, close friends and supporters by saying that the greatest tribute we could pay him was to struggle to build a movement of working people and youth that would independently achieve power and implement a democratic socialist programme which could finally resolve the acute problems for working class communities that Tony devoted his life to fighting.
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