Sweeney, John Anthony (Tony)

by Andrew Carpenter

Sweeney, John Anthony (Tony) (1931–2012), horse-racing journalist and bibliophile, was born on 26 June 1931 in London, son of John Sweeney (1887–1940), GPO surveyor, and his wife Kitty, daughter of James Joseph ('J. J.') Parkinson (qv). The Sweeneys had emigrated from Kerry to London after the family's eviction by a landlord's agent in the 1860s. John Sweeney (1857–1930), Tony's grandfather, joined the London Metropolitan Police, eventually becoming a senior Scotland Yard detective and one of those guarding Queen Victoria on her visit to Ireland in 1900.

Tony was a delicate child who suffered from asthma and spent long periods in a nursing home. When the London blitz started in 1940, his father sent him and his mother back to Ireland to live with her parents at Maddenstown Lodge, near the Curragh, Co. Kildare – a horse-racing environment in which Sweeney developed his life-long interest in the sport. He was educated at Castleknock College, Co. Dublin, where he was lucky to encounter the erudite historian Donal Cregan (qv), and at UCD, where he was taught for the single honours history degree by R. Dudley Edwards (qv) and T. Desmond Williams (qv). After he left UCD, his training in history research served him well as he embarked on a career as a racing journalist. One of his first assignments was to cover the 1956 Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe for the Daily Mirror. While in Paris, he met and fell in love with a beautiful young ballerina, Annie Paute, whom he married in 1957.

For the next fifty years Sweeney's enthusiasm for, and knowledge of, horse racing made him the doyen of Irish racing. No punter could afford to miss his columns in the Daily Mirror, to which he contributed from 1956 to 1997, and in the Irish Times. His column in the Evening Press appeared under the byline 'The Toff'. He contributed to many sporting papers and his columns were syndicated worldwide. From 1964 to 1998 he was a well-known and highly respected commentator on RTÉ television, initially from the paddock and later from the betting ring. His greatest accomplishment was when he tipped seventeen consecutive winners in 1968, but he had many other notable successes over the years. His knowledge of the sport was firmly based on his research, sometimes making use of his unrivalled collection of racing calendars going back to 1751. He was always willing to share his encyclopaedic knowledge of the sport and its personalities with fellow enthusiasts. His reputation as the undisputed oracle of the Irish racing fraternity was copper-fastened when, with the assistance of his wife Annie and the bookmaker Francis Hyland, he published The Sweeney guide to the Irish turf 1501–2001 (2002), a comprehensive statistical record of Irish racing laced with entertaining stories of those involved in it. He was elected to racing's hall of fame by the Irish National Steeplechase Committee in 2002, and received Horse Racing Ireland's 'contribution to the industry' award in 2007.

Sweeney was also a notable collector and cataloguer of books and silver. His sophisticated taste served him well in collecting seventeenth-century Irish silver, and he published Irish Stuart silver: a short descriptive catalogue of surviving Irish church, civic, ceremonial and domestic plate … 1603–1714 (1995). His collection of seventeenth-century Irish printed books was renowned in the world of scholarship: his 1997 publication, Ireland and the printed word: a short descriptive catalogue of early books, pamphlets, newsletters and broadsides relating to Ireland 1475–1700 earned him the degree of D.Litt. from the NUI in 2001. He was the first scholar to connect many of the 5,750 works in that catalogue with Ireland, and he also provided an entertaining (if eccentric) guide for collectors, indicating whether a book was 'important' or not and whether a collector seeking a copy might expect to find one in three years, five years, seven years or never. His catalogue numbers have become standard in the antiques and antiquarian book trades.

Sweeney died of a heart attack on 4 December 2012 at St James's Hospital, Dublin, and was buried at Mount Jerome Crematorium. He was predeceased by his wife Annie and survived by his son, Nicholas (b. 1958).