TONY GREGORY, who died yesterday aged 61, became famous for a deal that was never implemented and was conscious ever afterwards that his one chance at real political power had passed.
The death of the Dublin politician - who was intensely private and driven, yet possessed of a darkly dry humour - was deeply mourned last night, and nowhere more so than in his home constituency of Dublin Central.
He had battled against stomach cancer for a little over a year, and he had not been expected to die so quickly, but his condition weakened considerably in St Francis Hospice, Raheny, between Christmas and New Year's Day.
The removal and funeral will take place next Tuesday and Wednesday from St Agatha's Church, North William Street.
Born in 1947, Mr Gregory became a secondary school teacher after taking a degree at University College Dublin - something then rarely enjoyed by inner-city dwellers.
However, the experience did not take him away from his locality. If anything, it reinforced his ties to it, and to his belief that the inner city had been betrayed and ignored by those who had held power in the State.
Following his election to Dublin City Council in 1979, he won a Dáil seat in 1982 and negotiated his famous deal thereafter with Charles Haughey - one that would have kept him in political clover if Mr Haughey's administration had lasted, but it did not.
In return for his vote, Mr Gregory was promised nearly 500 local authority houses, extra teachers and 3,000 jobs. The agreement fell apart when Mr Haughey's government fell later that year.
Mr Gregory was condemned afterwards by many of those on the left for supporting Mr Haughey, but he was sure that he had done the right thing, regardless of the opinions of others.
The episode left a lingering residue in his already-tense relations with rising Fianna Fáil Dublin Central star Bertie Ahern, who was left outside in the car on Mr Gregory's orders while he negotiated with Mr Haughey.
Later, Mr Ahern had opportunities to even the score when he became lord mayor, and relations between the two were always difficult.
Before and after the last general election, there was speculation that Mr Gregory might become ceann comhairle. He was, he said, the last man to whom Mr Ahern would give such a reward - unless it was politically impossible to offer it to anyone else. The numbers came out differently to those expected, and the offer was never made.
During a lifetime of political battles - on drugs, housing and poverty - Gregory sometimes wearied at his inability to wield the levers of power to realise change. He always believed that he could have revolutionised the Department of Justice's thinking on drugs if he had sought a Minister of State's post there as part of the price of his 1981 deal with Haughey.
Last January, he was deeply angered after the Evening Herald ran a story about his illness and sent a reporter and photographer to his Ballybough home where they spoke to his brother Noel.
He complained to the Press Council that the newspaper had intruded into his privacy "at a time of distress and shock". He won a significant ruling, where it found that the newspaper had breached his privacy. The ruling was upheld on appeal.
