NIC2020:
The past is never dead. It's not even past.
Des Gunning
The Arts and its artistic history and activities in the area needs to be recognised and encouraged. The potential for heritage and tourism trails by creating a "whole city" approach to what our capital offers in this area – a literary tradition, history, architecture, the Port and its waterways, the remaining features of Georgian Dublin as well as its important role in the social and political struggles of the earlier quarter of the 20th Century. A considerable level of archival material exists locally to justify the creation of a permanent centralised exhibition space for this material of the history of the area.
- The Dublin North East Inner City – Creating a Brighter Future. February 2017
In Joyce’s epiphanies, the quotidian comes to be endowed with ideality. I think Mick Rafferty understands the whole Deal business in this Joycean sense better than anyone. Joyce’s epiphanies gesture beyond themselves, towards purpose. That is all. They will be criticised for ‘failing to delivery’ by those who miss the subtlety that the gesture was the thing. The author has done that work. Now it’s over to the reader.
In a letter to his brother Stanislaus, written in 1903, Joyce suggested a certain resemblance to the mystery of the Mass in what he was trying to do:
“ to give people some kind of intellectual pleasure or spiritual enjoyment by converting the bread of everyday life [ we could read ‘ of transactional politics’] into something that has a permanent artistic life of its own … for their mental, moral, and spiritual uplift.”
1982 was the centenary of Joyce's birth and it was generally felt that something should be done to celebrate it. It happened that Anthony Cronin, one of the original begetters of the Bloomsday, was the cultural adviser to Charles Haughey.
In the Spring of 1982, Willie Styles of RTÉ, Ireland's national broadcaster, was preparing a full-cast, unabridged, dramatised radio production of Ulysses, that ran uninterrupted for 29 hours and 45 minutes over June 15th and 16th . Sean O’Mordha’s television documentary on the young James Joyce ‘Is there one who understands me?’ won an Emmy.
Horizon Theatre Company, under the direction of John Beshaw Farrell and Bill Wertz, re-enacted the Wandering Rocks episode of Ulysses on the city streets.
With over 120 performers, celebrities, Joyce scholars etc. playing the roles and working the routes described by Joyce over an area of five or more square miles. The Lord Mayor of Dublin, for example, the Honorable Alexis Fitzgerald, played the Viceroy and led , in the magnificenrtly restored Lord Mayor’s carriage, a progress of carriages crossing the city from the Pheonix Park to the RDS in Ballsbridge.
In New York, Isaiah Sheffer initiated ‘Bloomsday on Broadway’ which endures. In Switzerland, Fritz Senn, formalised plans for whay would become, in 1985, the Zurich James Joyce Foundation.
I consider that, on Bloomsday 1982, when Councillor Alice Glenn handed over to David Norris ( not yet Senator at time) the keys of No 35 North Great George's Street, it marked a turning point in Dublin Corporation's policy - in place since the Fenian Street collapse of 1963 - of demolishing older buildings whenever the opportunity presented itself.
No 35 North Great George’s Street fell into dereliction for several decades. But it had housed, apart from Professor Maginni’s Dancing Academy, as mentioned in Ulysses, Iona Hall, which was the birthplace of the Dublin Vigilance Committee in November 1911. Joyce's 'Gas From a burner' (1912) was originally called 'Mr Falconer addresses the Vigilance Committee'.
Later it would be where on 30 July 1919, Dick McKee, Mick McConnell, Frank Slattery, Tom Cullen and Liam Tobin formed ‘The Squad,’ the formation that, arguably, allowed the war of Indepence to be brought to a negotiated truce.
No 35 North Great George's Street is now fully restored. The terraces beside and across from it have been rebuilt sympathetically, giving a sense of what can be achieved through effort sustained over a period of time. _
Des Gunning
The Arts and its artistic history and activities in the area needs to be recognised and encouraged. The potential for heritage and tourism trails by creating a "whole city" approach to what our capital offers in this area – a literary tradition, history, architecture, the Port and its waterways, the remaining features of Georgian Dublin as well as its important role in the social and political struggles of the earlier quarter of the 20th Century. A considerable level of archival material exists locally to justify the creation of a permanent centralised exhibition space for this material of the history of the area.
- The Dublin North East Inner City – Creating a Brighter Future. February 2017
In Joyce’s epiphanies, the quotidian comes to be endowed with ideality. I think Mick Rafferty understands the whole Deal business in this Joycean sense better than anyone. Joyce’s epiphanies gesture beyond themselves, towards purpose. That is all. They will be criticised for ‘failing to delivery’ by those who miss the subtlety that the gesture was the thing. The author has done that work. Now it’s over to the reader.
In a letter to his brother Stanislaus, written in 1903, Joyce suggested a certain resemblance to the mystery of the Mass in what he was trying to do:
“ to give people some kind of intellectual pleasure or spiritual enjoyment by converting the bread of everyday life [ we could read ‘ of transactional politics’] into something that has a permanent artistic life of its own … for their mental, moral, and spiritual uplift.”
1982 was the centenary of Joyce's birth and it was generally felt that something should be done to celebrate it. It happened that Anthony Cronin, one of the original begetters of the Bloomsday, was the cultural adviser to Charles Haughey.
In the Spring of 1982, Willie Styles of RTÉ, Ireland's national broadcaster, was preparing a full-cast, unabridged, dramatised radio production of Ulysses, that ran uninterrupted for 29 hours and 45 minutes over June 15th and 16th . Sean O’Mordha’s television documentary on the young James Joyce ‘Is there one who understands me?’ won an Emmy.
Horizon Theatre Company, under the direction of John Beshaw Farrell and Bill Wertz, re-enacted the Wandering Rocks episode of Ulysses on the city streets.
With over 120 performers, celebrities, Joyce scholars etc. playing the roles and working the routes described by Joyce over an area of five or more square miles. The Lord Mayor of Dublin, for example, the Honorable Alexis Fitzgerald, played the Viceroy and led , in the magnificenrtly restored Lord Mayor’s carriage, a progress of carriages crossing the city from the Pheonix Park to the RDS in Ballsbridge.
In New York, Isaiah Sheffer initiated ‘Bloomsday on Broadway’ which endures. In Switzerland, Fritz Senn, formalised plans for whay would become, in 1985, the Zurich James Joyce Foundation.
I consider that, on Bloomsday 1982, when Councillor Alice Glenn handed over to David Norris ( not yet Senator at time) the keys of No 35 North Great George's Street, it marked a turning point in Dublin Corporation's policy - in place since the Fenian Street collapse of 1963 - of demolishing older buildings whenever the opportunity presented itself.
No 35 North Great George’s Street fell into dereliction for several decades. But it had housed, apart from Professor Maginni’s Dancing Academy, as mentioned in Ulysses, Iona Hall, which was the birthplace of the Dublin Vigilance Committee in November 1911. Joyce's 'Gas From a burner' (1912) was originally called 'Mr Falconer addresses the Vigilance Committee'.
Later it would be where on 30 July 1919, Dick McKee, Mick McConnell, Frank Slattery, Tom Cullen and Liam Tobin formed ‘The Squad,’ the formation that, arguably, allowed the war of Indepence to be brought to a negotiated truce.
No 35 North Great George's Street is now fully restored. The terraces beside and across from it have been rebuilt sympathetically, giving a sense of what can be achieved through effort sustained over a period of time. _
Power Play
Colin Murphy, Sunday Business Post 28 January 2018
For a singular moment in history, Dublin’s impoverished north inner city was at the centre of the national discourse, and had an eloquent, impassioned leader fighting for it
One evening in February 1982, Bertie Ahern drove Charles Haughey to a modest building on Summerhill Parade, at the edge of the city bounded by the Royal Canal. Ahern stayed in the car while Haughey went inside, to a threadbare office lit by a bare lightbulb. “I know what I want,” he told the three men there. “What do you want?”
Two and a half weeks later, Haughey would return to this room to sign a 30-page document, erratically formatted and hastily typed on a typewriter that was falling apart. The following day, the document’s headlines would be read into the Dáil record; it would make its co-author, 35-year-old Tony Gregory, both notorious and iconic, and Charles J Haughey Taoiseach for the second time.
Eight months later, Haughey’s government fell. With it went the Gregory Deal, as the document had become known. It was largely unimplemented. Yet the Gregory Deal lived on - in the culture.
In the southside boroughs where I grew up, it was a shorthand for Fianna-Fáil-sponsored stroke politics, a sordid arrangement between a populist party and a craven local TD. In the Dublin Central constituency, the Gregory name still helps to elect his friend and successor, Maureen O’Sullivan. And in the place known by outsiders as the north inner city, the Gregory Deal marks an historical moment that is seared into the local memory.
One evening in February, 2016, a small crowd gathered in the parish hall of All Saints’ Church in Phibsborough, just outside the north inner city. They were there to watch a re-enactment of a notorious recent meeting of Dublin City Council, at which ineptitude had caused the collapse of the local area plan for Phibsborough. The local arts festival, Phizzfest, organised the re-enactment, called The Lap Dance (available on YouTube; but make sure you’re watching the right video). I was drafted in to adapt the transcript of the council meeting. Jim Culleton of Fishamble Theatre Company directed.
Colin Murphy: ‘In the southside boroughs where I grew up, the Gregory deal was a shorthand for Fianna Fáil stroke politics’ Pic: Fergal Phillips
At the performance, a longtime local arts activist, Des Gunning, sat beside Maureen O’Sullivan. Afterwards, Gunning said to her: “We should do something like this about the Gregory Deal.” Gunning brought the idea to me; we brought it to Fishamble. O’Sullivan helped bring in some local funding, most notably from the Croke Park Community Fund. I set about meeting the people involved at the time, and researching the historical record.
On February 8, the resulting play, Haughey/Gregory, opens at the Peacock Theatre, produced by Fishamble, for three (sold out) nights. Earlier that week, we will bring it to two institutions in which both men spent time: Leinster House and Mountjoy Prison. (Gregory did time for contempt of court following a protest in support of Moore Street’s traders; Haughey merely visited the jail, in his capacity as Minister for Justice.)
The play takes place mostly in the weeks between the general election of February 1982 and Haughey’s election as Taoiseach. But the story starts in the 1950s, when a new invention hit Dublin Port.
In an age when an online social network can be one of the world’s most valuable companies, it is hard to conceive of a humble shipping container as disruptive technology. But the invention of the standardised container revolutionised global trade: loading and unloading ships became so much quicker that the cost of international trade plummeted. In the process, containerisation displaced a vast workforce of dockers.
The docks had been the mainstay of male employment in central Dublin. Other local businesses relied either on the trade through the docks, or on the income made by the dockers. Containerisation meant not merely a loss of occupation and income, but also of identity. Poverty and crime increased; the ‘inner city’ became synonymous with dereliction. Hand-wringing editorials in the Irish Times worried what was to be done, and lamented that you couldn’t drive through the area without getting your handbag stolen.
Then the city’s planners came up with a solution. They would turn the north inner city into an access route into the city centre. Thousands of local-authority tenants would be relocated to new estates in the suburbs, allowing the Corporation to raze the existing Georgian housing and rebuild: wide streets, parks, playgrounds, car parks, but not very much housing.
Some of this happened, sundering community networks built up over generations and depriving the community of much of its social capital. But in response to the Corporation’s plans, local activists got more organised. A council of community groups was formed, with a young teacher from Ballybough as its chairman: Tony Gregory.
The activists won their first campaign: the Corporation backed down on the relocation plans. Flush with that success, Gregory won election as a councillor in 1979. He missed out on a Dáil seat in 1981, but in February 1982 he took the fifth seat in Dublin Central.
His decision to run was controversial among his community-activist comrades. Some feared it would take too much time away from community action.Others believed that any accommodation with the political mainstream was a sell-out.
And Gregory’s own background in militant republicanism was divisive: he had been a member of Official Sinn Féin and was close to Seamus Costello, who had left the Officials and formed the Irish Republican Socialist Party and its armed wing, the INLA. Costello was murdered on Dublin’s North Strand in 1977. According to Gregory’s biographer, Robbie Gilligan, Gregory joined the IRSP, but merely in order to help build the numbers, and was not active.
Tony Gregory addresses a public meeting in Lourdes Hall in north inner-city Dublin in 1982 Pic: Derek Speirs
Gregory’s closest associates, alongside his brother Noel, were Mick Rafferty and Fergus McCabe. They disagreed vehemently with Gregory on the North; had they let it, the issue would have split the group. Instead, they agreed to park it, and focus instead on the issues affecting their community.
Gregory’s election, and his surprise position apparently holding the balance of power, vindicated the decision to run. Suddenly, this relative unknown was being solicited by Charles Haughey and Garret FitzGerald.
Both men did their homework on Gregory. FitzGerald came to meet him with a large document including detailed plans for a new-fangled scheme to link computer terminals in local schools up to a mainframe hosted by a multinational company in London, which would provide online training courses. Haughey had Martin Mansergh put together a plan with the aid of Haughey’s brother, Sean, who was a senior official in Dublin Corporation. (There were also unproductive meetings with Labour leader Michael O’Leary and with the three TDs of Sinn Féin The Workers’ Party.)
Haughey trumped FitzGerald on the breath and scale of his proposals: he was prepared to meet any of their demands that seemed feasible (though he drew the line at nationalising the banks, implementing the Kenny Report on land taxation and putting an oil refinery in Dublin Bay). Whereas Haughey was comfortable dealing with Gregory’s team alone, FitzGerald was ill at ease, and brought the TD Jim Mitchell with him: the Gregory team saw Mitchell, from Inchicore, as FitzGerald’s “interpreter”.
Haughey was a northsider; he had grown up in Donnycarney. His accountancy office and his political base had been on Amiens Street, and he could name individual flat blocks in the area. FitzGerald was detached; Haughey ‘got it’. The outcome quickly became inevitable.
Having signed the deal (after a slapstick routine involving a broken typewriter and bits of the deal left out because they forgot or lost the pieces of paper on which they had been noted), Gregory, Rafferty, McCabe and Haughey repaired to a local pub, Belton’s. But Haughey didn’t carry cash, and Gregory too said he was skint: Fergus McCabe had to stump up for the drinks.
Gregory read the deal’s highlights into the Dáil record, to outrage from the opposition benches and opprobrium from much of the media. And then work on the implementation started. Money was pumped into social housing. Planning started for a secondary school. A bill was drafted to set up new development commissions for the docklands and for the “walled city”; it passed second stage before the summer.
Gregory and colleagues had a review meeting with Haughey that summer. An all-new issue was the first item on their agenda: heroin. An epidemic had suddenly hit the inner city. A study that found that 10 per cent of 15-to-24-year-olds had already tried the drug.
Haughey promised to focus on the problem on his return from his summer holiday on Inishvickillane. They believed him. He invited them to visit the island, but they declined.
The sequence of events that followed was grotesque, unbelievable, bizarre and unprecedented. A murderer, Malcolm Macarthur, was apprehended in the apartment of the then attorney general Patrick Connolly, provoking a full-scale political crisis (despite there being nothing political about the events). Fianna Fáil lost two TDs to heart attacks. In the meantime, Haughey was coming to terms with the poor economic situation, leading to a new austerity drive. The Workers’ Party pulled their support. Suddenly, Gregory’s vote was no longer enough.
The government fell and the deal died. Gregory returned to the margins: he was repeatedly returned in Dublin Central and consistently prominent in local campaigns, but never again possessed the political leverage of February-March 1982. Had he not died early of cancer in January 2009, aged 61, he may well have found that leverage again in 2016. He could have been in government today.
Garret FitzGerald, who had failed in his bid to cut a deal with Gregory, looked back on it in an article in 2000. “In 1982, for the first time,” he wrote, “post-election horse-trading on the basis of local agendas became a major distorting feature of our electoral system.” More recently, again in the Irish Times, Harry McGee referred to the deal as a “stroke”.
But this is absurd. Politics is transactional. Ideology may motivate people to get involved in politics; but politics is what happens when those people meet people of differing ideologies, and have to negotiate with them. Those negotiations are inherently transactional.
The ideal-type negotiations invoked by FitzGerald, in which both parties are pursuing the “national interest”, are typically negotiations in which no party is pursuing the interests of communities like Dublin’s inner city. Gregory got one chance, and he negotiated for all he was worth.
The deal was not a wash-out. Housing was built. Some measures, such as Larkin Community College, happened eventually, though much delayed. But its greatest legacy may be cultural, or psycho- social. It was a moment in time when a community twice ravaged (by unemployment and by depopulation), and about to be ravaged anew by heroin, found itself at the heart of national politics with an eloquent spokesman making its case, and being listened to. The deal said to people that they mattered; and that matters, still.
That the deal ultimately failed was tragic. And that Gregory’s career never again reached the heights on which it started was also tragic: he was, in some senses, a victim of this early success. The deal was only possible because of his resolute independence as a community representative but, had he chosen to follow a more conventional political path, within a party, he may ultimately have been able to wield more lasting policy influence. (Then again, had the political parties been less resentful of his independence and local cachet, they could have allowed him more influence.)
The paradox of the Gregory Deal is that something that failed could be so ennobling. But that is the nature of tragedy.
Haughey/Gregory runs at the Peacock Theatre in Dublin, in a sold-out, script-in-hand presentation, from February 8-10
For a singular moment in history, Dublin’s impoverished north inner city was at the centre of the national discourse, and had an eloquent, impassioned leader fighting for it
One evening in February 1982, Bertie Ahern drove Charles Haughey to a modest building on Summerhill Parade, at the edge of the city bounded by the Royal Canal. Ahern stayed in the car while Haughey went inside, to a threadbare office lit by a bare lightbulb. “I know what I want,” he told the three men there. “What do you want?”
Two and a half weeks later, Haughey would return to this room to sign a 30-page document, erratically formatted and hastily typed on a typewriter that was falling apart. The following day, the document’s headlines would be read into the Dáil record; it would make its co-author, 35-year-old Tony Gregory, both notorious and iconic, and Charles J Haughey Taoiseach for the second time.
Eight months later, Haughey’s government fell. With it went the Gregory Deal, as the document had become known. It was largely unimplemented. Yet the Gregory Deal lived on - in the culture.
In the southside boroughs where I grew up, it was a shorthand for Fianna-Fáil-sponsored stroke politics, a sordid arrangement between a populist party and a craven local TD. In the Dublin Central constituency, the Gregory name still helps to elect his friend and successor, Maureen O’Sullivan. And in the place known by outsiders as the north inner city, the Gregory Deal marks an historical moment that is seared into the local memory.
One evening in February, 2016, a small crowd gathered in the parish hall of All Saints’ Church in Phibsborough, just outside the north inner city. They were there to watch a re-enactment of a notorious recent meeting of Dublin City Council, at which ineptitude had caused the collapse of the local area plan for Phibsborough. The local arts festival, Phizzfest, organised the re-enactment, called The Lap Dance (available on YouTube; but make sure you’re watching the right video). I was drafted in to adapt the transcript of the council meeting. Jim Culleton of Fishamble Theatre Company directed.
Colin Murphy: ‘In the southside boroughs where I grew up, the Gregory deal was a shorthand for Fianna Fáil stroke politics’ Pic: Fergal Phillips
At the performance, a longtime local arts activist, Des Gunning, sat beside Maureen O’Sullivan. Afterwards, Gunning said to her: “We should do something like this about the Gregory Deal.” Gunning brought the idea to me; we brought it to Fishamble. O’Sullivan helped bring in some local funding, most notably from the Croke Park Community Fund. I set about meeting the people involved at the time, and researching the historical record.
On February 8, the resulting play, Haughey/Gregory, opens at the Peacock Theatre, produced by Fishamble, for three (sold out) nights. Earlier that week, we will bring it to two institutions in which both men spent time: Leinster House and Mountjoy Prison. (Gregory did time for contempt of court following a protest in support of Moore Street’s traders; Haughey merely visited the jail, in his capacity as Minister for Justice.)
The play takes place mostly in the weeks between the general election of February 1982 and Haughey’s election as Taoiseach. But the story starts in the 1950s, when a new invention hit Dublin Port.
In an age when an online social network can be one of the world’s most valuable companies, it is hard to conceive of a humble shipping container as disruptive technology. But the invention of the standardised container revolutionised global trade: loading and unloading ships became so much quicker that the cost of international trade plummeted. In the process, containerisation displaced a vast workforce of dockers.
The docks had been the mainstay of male employment in central Dublin. Other local businesses relied either on the trade through the docks, or on the income made by the dockers. Containerisation meant not merely a loss of occupation and income, but also of identity. Poverty and crime increased; the ‘inner city’ became synonymous with dereliction. Hand-wringing editorials in the Irish Times worried what was to be done, and lamented that you couldn’t drive through the area without getting your handbag stolen.
Then the city’s planners came up with a solution. They would turn the north inner city into an access route into the city centre. Thousands of local-authority tenants would be relocated to new estates in the suburbs, allowing the Corporation to raze the existing Georgian housing and rebuild: wide streets, parks, playgrounds, car parks, but not very much housing.
Some of this happened, sundering community networks built up over generations and depriving the community of much of its social capital. But in response to the Corporation’s plans, local activists got more organised. A council of community groups was formed, with a young teacher from Ballybough as its chairman: Tony Gregory.
The activists won their first campaign: the Corporation backed down on the relocation plans. Flush with that success, Gregory won election as a councillor in 1979. He missed out on a Dáil seat in 1981, but in February 1982 he took the fifth seat in Dublin Central.
His decision to run was controversial among his community-activist comrades. Some feared it would take too much time away from community action.Others believed that any accommodation with the political mainstream was a sell-out.
And Gregory’s own background in militant republicanism was divisive: he had been a member of Official Sinn Féin and was close to Seamus Costello, who had left the Officials and formed the Irish Republican Socialist Party and its armed wing, the INLA. Costello was murdered on Dublin’s North Strand in 1977. According to Gregory’s biographer, Robbie Gilligan, Gregory joined the IRSP, but merely in order to help build the numbers, and was not active.
Tony Gregory addresses a public meeting in Lourdes Hall in north inner-city Dublin in 1982 Pic: Derek Speirs
Gregory’s closest associates, alongside his brother Noel, were Mick Rafferty and Fergus McCabe. They disagreed vehemently with Gregory on the North; had they let it, the issue would have split the group. Instead, they agreed to park it, and focus instead on the issues affecting their community.
Gregory’s election, and his surprise position apparently holding the balance of power, vindicated the decision to run. Suddenly, this relative unknown was being solicited by Charles Haughey and Garret FitzGerald.
Both men did their homework on Gregory. FitzGerald came to meet him with a large document including detailed plans for a new-fangled scheme to link computer terminals in local schools up to a mainframe hosted by a multinational company in London, which would provide online training courses. Haughey had Martin Mansergh put together a plan with the aid of Haughey’s brother, Sean, who was a senior official in Dublin Corporation. (There were also unproductive meetings with Labour leader Michael O’Leary and with the three TDs of Sinn Féin The Workers’ Party.)
Haughey trumped FitzGerald on the breath and scale of his proposals: he was prepared to meet any of their demands that seemed feasible (though he drew the line at nationalising the banks, implementing the Kenny Report on land taxation and putting an oil refinery in Dublin Bay). Whereas Haughey was comfortable dealing with Gregory’s team alone, FitzGerald was ill at ease, and brought the TD Jim Mitchell with him: the Gregory team saw Mitchell, from Inchicore, as FitzGerald’s “interpreter”.
Haughey was a northsider; he had grown up in Donnycarney. His accountancy office and his political base had been on Amiens Street, and he could name individual flat blocks in the area. FitzGerald was detached; Haughey ‘got it’. The outcome quickly became inevitable.
Having signed the deal (after a slapstick routine involving a broken typewriter and bits of the deal left out because they forgot or lost the pieces of paper on which they had been noted), Gregory, Rafferty, McCabe and Haughey repaired to a local pub, Belton’s. But Haughey didn’t carry cash, and Gregory too said he was skint: Fergus McCabe had to stump up for the drinks.
Gregory read the deal’s highlights into the Dáil record, to outrage from the opposition benches and opprobrium from much of the media. And then work on the implementation started. Money was pumped into social housing. Planning started for a secondary school. A bill was drafted to set up new development commissions for the docklands and for the “walled city”; it passed second stage before the summer.
Gregory and colleagues had a review meeting with Haughey that summer. An all-new issue was the first item on their agenda: heroin. An epidemic had suddenly hit the inner city. A study that found that 10 per cent of 15-to-24-year-olds had already tried the drug.
Haughey promised to focus on the problem on his return from his summer holiday on Inishvickillane. They believed him. He invited them to visit the island, but they declined.
The sequence of events that followed was grotesque, unbelievable, bizarre and unprecedented. A murderer, Malcolm Macarthur, was apprehended in the apartment of the then attorney general Patrick Connolly, provoking a full-scale political crisis (despite there being nothing political about the events). Fianna Fáil lost two TDs to heart attacks. In the meantime, Haughey was coming to terms with the poor economic situation, leading to a new austerity drive. The Workers’ Party pulled their support. Suddenly, Gregory’s vote was no longer enough.
The government fell and the deal died. Gregory returned to the margins: he was repeatedly returned in Dublin Central and consistently prominent in local campaigns, but never again possessed the political leverage of February-March 1982. Had he not died early of cancer in January 2009, aged 61, he may well have found that leverage again in 2016. He could have been in government today.
Garret FitzGerald, who had failed in his bid to cut a deal with Gregory, looked back on it in an article in 2000. “In 1982, for the first time,” he wrote, “post-election horse-trading on the basis of local agendas became a major distorting feature of our electoral system.” More recently, again in the Irish Times, Harry McGee referred to the deal as a “stroke”.
But this is absurd. Politics is transactional. Ideology may motivate people to get involved in politics; but politics is what happens when those people meet people of differing ideologies, and have to negotiate with them. Those negotiations are inherently transactional.
The ideal-type negotiations invoked by FitzGerald, in which both parties are pursuing the “national interest”, are typically negotiations in which no party is pursuing the interests of communities like Dublin’s inner city. Gregory got one chance, and he negotiated for all he was worth.
The deal was not a wash-out. Housing was built. Some measures, such as Larkin Community College, happened eventually, though much delayed. But its greatest legacy may be cultural, or psycho- social. It was a moment in time when a community twice ravaged (by unemployment and by depopulation), and about to be ravaged anew by heroin, found itself at the heart of national politics with an eloquent spokesman making its case, and being listened to. The deal said to people that they mattered; and that matters, still.
That the deal ultimately failed was tragic. And that Gregory’s career never again reached the heights on which it started was also tragic: he was, in some senses, a victim of this early success. The deal was only possible because of his resolute independence as a community representative but, had he chosen to follow a more conventional political path, within a party, he may ultimately have been able to wield more lasting policy influence. (Then again, had the political parties been less resentful of his independence and local cachet, they could have allowed him more influence.)
The paradox of the Gregory Deal is that something that failed could be so ennobling. But that is the nature of tragedy.
Haughey/Gregory runs at the Peacock Theatre in Dublin, in a sold-out, script-in-hand presentation, from February 8-10
