Anthony (Tony) Jordan, whose death a year ago we still mourn, was the man who reclaimed for Sandymount the poet William Butler Yeats. Tony organised annual poetry readings on Yeats’ birthday here on the Green. Always imaginative and inclusive, he involved a range of local people, young and old, in the event as well as some distinguished strangers. He campaigned to have a bust of the poet in the Green – where it stands today, a permanent statement of Yeats’ Sandymount connection.
There was, it should be said, much more to Tony than Yeats and Sandymount. Tony was a Mayo man, born in Ballyhaunis in 1942. His father was a returned American emigrant who had a shop in the town and a farm nearby. He died when Tony was only four. Tony went from the local National School to St Jarlath’s College in Tuam where he starred in Gaelic football and was on a team that won the all-Ireland colleges final in 1960.
From there he went to Maynooth to study for the priesthood. Only in his fifth year when he had reached the stage of taking a vow of celibacy did he begin to have doubts about his vocation. On his own account, watching Doris Day in a bedroom scene in the film Move over Darling made him realise that celibacy was not for him and that he could not go on.
Cardinal Tomás Ó Fiaich, then Professor of History at Maynooth, had taken a liking to Tony when he heard him sing a rebel song and got him into St Patrick’s Drumcondra, to train as a National School teacher. “It taught me how to teach,” he recalled, “something the Higher Diploma in Education course I did in UCD the following year did not.”
The sense of service that had inspired Tony’s vocation for the priesthood remained with him. After short spells teaching in local schools he taught students in the Central Remedial Clinic (CRC) founded by Lady Valerie Goulding and Kathleen O’Rourke. He was an early member of the Samaritans, an organisation committed to lend a supportive, totally confidential ear to those suffering psychological stress.
He married his wife Mary, also from Mayo, in 1969. Their first child Antonia died less than two days after her birth in 1970. Tony, an emotional man, never really got over it. There were two other daughters of this happy marriage, Fiona and Judith.
In 1973 he was headhunted to take charge of the school attached to the Cerebral Palsy Centre (now Enable Ireland) in Sandymount. He remained in this position until 2002, navigating in his unyielding way the challenges of ensuring that education was not neglected in an organisation whose main thrust was medical. To be near his work he moved from Portmarnock to live in Sandymount.
Writing was a lifelong interest. As a young teacher he had written a novel, in which a London publisher evinced some interest, that contained some explicit sexual scenes. Deterred by the experience of author John McGahern, who had been dismissed from his post as a national teacher when he published a book with such scenes, Tony put his work away. (The novel Tell My Mother I… was published in 2020 by Westport Books, Ed.)
When he returned to writing around 1990 it was mainly as a biographer. He produced some twenty books. An early book contained the letters of Christy Brown, an alumnus of the Sandymount School, who, despite severe physical disabilities, became a noted writer and artist.
Tony’s admiration for Yeats, the poet, did not prevent him taking issue with Yeats’ repetition of charges made by his beloved Maud Gonne against her husband John McBride, a Mayo man executed in 1916. It was one of many causes Tony took up. He was a doughty controversialist.
Among his formidable output of eighteen books were short biographies of Conor Cruise O’Brien, Seán McBride, John A. Costello, and W.T. Cosgrave. They rendered useful service opening up subjects previously neglected and contained some new material. He was in contention with then Minister for Education Mary Hanafin when her department donated free copies of a book on her former party leader Éamon de Valera to every school in the land, but refused to do the same for Tony’s book on Cosgrave. A later life interest in James Joyce led Tony to write a book about him and to organise several Bloomsday events on Sandymount Green. Tony pressed the government to do for Joyce what a previous government had done for Yeats, that is repatriate his body to Ireland.
My abiding vision of Tony is of a dark figure pacing rapidly along the promenade on the Strand Road with head down deep in contemplation, allowing himself a short break from his punishing work schedule. Until his final year of illness Tony, as he was known, remained a restless man bent on making his mark and wasting not a moment of his life. His last book published in 2021 was a memoir containing letters from his correspondence arising out of the many controversies of his life. He donated his papers to the National Library.
Others benefited from his focus and dedication, notably in recent years, the village of Sandymount, where he organised on its charming English-style green each June a Yeats day. It marked the poet’s birth nearby in that month, and his ancestral connections with the adjacent Sandymount Castle. Locals and celebrities alike were recruited to recite or read Yeats’s work. Thanks, in part, to Tony busts of Yeats and of Seamus Heaney, a long-time Strand Road resident, adorn the Green.
A last wish expressed when he realised that he was mortally ill was that this event would go on. Joe Lynch, Louise Burke and the other organisers of this day in the Green have kept faith with him. We are indebted to them, as we are to Tony for enriching our lives.
Tony passed away on May the 3rd, 2023, aged 81. The funeral mass took place at Star of the Sea Church in Sandymount, where Tony was a parishioner, and which features in Joyce’s Ulysses. Tony is survived by his wife, his two daughters and a grandchild Lily.
