Dublin north-inner city candidates evoke spirit of the late great Tony Gregory

Among some of the candidates there are fervent expressions of a wish to emulate him.

And there is always the question of who is coming in his wake, who is the strong voice to represent one of the most disadvantaged enclaves in the State.

Gary Gannon is knocking on doors in Summerhill, across the road from the Primary Care Health Centre.

He has been a TD for the Dublin Central constituency since 2020 and is by now one of the leading figures in the Social Democrats stable.

The late independent TD Tony Gregory: Among some of the candidates there are fervent expressions of a wish to emulate him. Picture: Billy Higgins

The centre is a huge addition to the area since it was officially opened in 2019, but there was a need for it for at least 30 years before that.

Gannon grew up around the corner.

“Hiya Gary,” is a typical response from the few who answer the knock.

Everybody knows him, he’s one of their own, local lad made good.

Yeah, he says, Tony Gregory did great things.

“But he had a great infrastructure around him, my first mentor in politics was Fergus McCabe who worked closely with Tony, he’s my hero.”

Gannon smiles wryly when he hears Gregory is being namechecked by opponents of his such as Independent Clare Daly and Gerry ‘the Monk’ Hutch.

The day is cold but bright, fair weather for canvassing. One house just off Summerhill is bedecked completely with Christmas decorations.

The woman pulls Gary into a conspiratorial huddle and he asks to be given five minutes with her inside. It turns out she has a number of issues, about education for an additional needs child and a series of problems with the council.

Like most of those who answer, it is local issues that dominate any conversation.

The word ‘trauma’ tends to be overused these days but is highly appropriate in enclaves such as this.

“It’s intergenerational often,” Gannon says.

“And much of it has been ignored by governments again and again.”

Within minutes, Daniel Ennis leaps from a car and Gary directs him to the decorated house. Ennis was elected to Dublin City Council last June for the Soc Dems.

Gary knew him from soccer, approached him, and Ennis ran, expanding the party’s base in this area.

Back on Summerhill, another resident, Esther, has a problem that needs addressing. She points to the street lights outside her home.

“I’ve been onto the council,” she says.

“They’re not working and this is a long black spot at night which is not good. It needs to get done.”

Gannon came to politics through community work in this area. He ran for the council as an independent in 2014 but soon saw there was a more structured way of trying to tackle long-standing problems.

“We’ve had a strong voice in the community,” he says.

“But what we’ve never really had is a strong legislator, somebody to go in and get centrally involved in allocating budgets and that sort of thing. I couldn’t do that as an independent, I wanted something that suited me.”

He had talks with various parties, including Sinn Féin and People Before Profit, but decided on the Soc Dems as the best vehicle to pursue the kind of politics he is interested in.

Mary Lou McDonald is widely expected to retain her seat.

Gannon is in a dogfight to retain his seat in what has turned out to be the most colourful constituency in this election.

Paschal Donohoe and Mary Lou McDonald are the “big cheeses” here, on opposite sides of the political divide.

Gannon and Green Party rebel Nessa Hourigan make up the complement of the four outgoing TDs.

Paschal and Mary Lou are expected to be comfortably returned.

Hourigan is well regarded but if the tide goes out on the Greens, her candidacy could be beached.

Then there is Mary Fitzpatrick, the Fianna Fáil senator whose career was in cold storage during Bertie Ahern’s time as he did not rate her.

Once Bertie was gone, the collapse of her party in 2011 hit her. She’s been trying to get back since, but the competition is now stiffer than ever before.

The Labour Party’s Marie Sherlock is also putting in a big effort, but short of an unlikely surge to Labour she may have to sit this one out.

The constituency includes the north-inner city but spreads out towards Stoneybatter, hugs the perimeter of Phoenix Park and pulls across to Phibsborough and into middle-class Glasnevin.

Immigration, Gannon says, is not coming up as much as some people might think.

“It will come up but not in the way it’s presented,” he says.

A major protest against accommodating asylum seekers in nearby East Wall was a flashpoint earlier in the year.

Gannon says it was a game-changer, which led him and his colleagues to redouble their efforts in the community, engaging to fight the lies of extremist sentiment.

“Back before I was in politics, when I was going through the access programme in Trinity, Fergus [McCabe] had me working on an initiative with migrants and we set up a football club. That’s where I got my ethics and values.

There is a lot of community work going on and after a while people begin to accept others, once they get to know the faces.

Down on Rutland Street, a woman answers, her mother in the background holding a baby. Gannon introduces himself.

“Are you with Christy,” she says, referring to the long time local rep, Christy Burke.

Gannon explains Christy is not running this time and maybe she’ll give him a vote.

She looks again at his flyer and says she might do.

He points to a former school on the street.

“My mother was kicked out of there when she was 12 for tripping up a nun,” he says.

“She couldn’t read of write till she was in her 30s and that’s a reflection of a lot of people’s experience. Sometimes, if you don’t have the language to express your trauma it manifests itself in other ways, absolutely.”

The two candidates who have added wattage to this constituency are late entrants to the race, Hutch and Daly.

The latter was a TD for eight years in Dublin Fingal before being elected an MEP in 2019.

She was a highly effective legislator who consistently held the government of the day to account.

In Europe, a lot of her focus was international affairs and she and her political colleague Mick Wallace were lauded on state-run media in totalitarian run countries like Russia, China and Syria.

For their part, they described their politics as “peace building”, a term that can encompass whatever you want.

The only apparent common thread in their various forays appeared to be a form of kinship with any regimes that were vehemently anti-American.

Daly lost her seat in June’s election.

Independent candidate Gerry Hutch: In an interview on the Crimeworld podcast, he was effusive in his praise of Tony Gregory. Picture: Leah Farrell/RollingNews.ie

Maureen O’Sullivan, who was Gregory’s chosen successor and held his seat after his death in 2009 until her retirement in 2020, is backing Daly’s campaign.

A month ago, Gerry Hutch was facing a long spell imprisoned on remand in Spain while the authorities conducted an investigation into money laundering.

Once he decided to run, he was freed under an EU law that is designed to prevent imprisonment of political opponents of autocratic leaders.

In an interview on the Crimeworld podcast, he was effusive in his praise of Tony Gregory.

“What we have now here [in the inner city] are TDs, but we don’t have a representative. I want to be that representative,” he said.

His contention would be highly disputed by all sitting TDs and councillors in the area.

As of now, those two candidates will be fighting hard for the last two seats. Gannon doesn’t appear bothered.

He says his party “very much wants” to be in government.

“Only though, if we can learn from the mistakes of centre-left parties who went in before which, to some degrees, made promises that they couldn’t deliver.

“I want to be in government but not a government where I have to concede everything I believe in. Social democracy for me is is about intervention by the State. And you don’t take that away when times are bad.”