It was a ‘dismal’ sight, cried the Irish Times. It was ‘beyond distressing’. It was ‘enough to curdle many a pint of stout’. ‘The shamrock bowl lies wilting’, the paper wailed, like one of those be-shawled auld women who once stalked the lanes of Ireland issuing dark prophecies to all and sundry. What has happened to stir up such fright and foreboding at Ireland’s newspaper of record? Have the Brits returned? Is a new potato blight afoot? Are the Magdalene laundries reopening? Nope – Conor McGregor went to the White House.
I’m serious. All that rending of garments on the opinion pages of Ireland’s ponciest paper was over McGregor’s fleeting drop-in to Donald Trump’s White House for St Patrick’s Day yesterday. ‘Why did Donald Trump bring Conor McGregor to the White House?’, the headline barks. I’ll translate that for those unfamiliar with Ireland’s pompous media elite: ‘Why did the American president invite a babbling bruiser from Crumlin and not me? I went to Trinity for heaven’s sake.’
The meltdown over McGregor’s jaunt to Washington, DC has been equal parts hilarious and terrifying. No sooner had the UFC braggart done his ‘billionaire strut’ outside the White House than Ireland’s scribes were pounding their keyboards in fuming disapproval. ‘The Irish image abroad took a hit’ when this ‘MMA fighter was given the microphone in the White House’, said one at the Irish Independent. They really can’t believe a Crumlin boy was allowed to speak in public. The horror!
What did McGregor say that was apparently so shame-inducing for the Emerald Isle? Nothing really. He bemoaned mass immigration, as he’s been doing for some time. The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, introduced him to her assembled hacks whereupon he had a pop at Ireland’s rulers. There’s an ‘illegal-immigration racket’ in my country, he said, sounding uncharacteristically nervous. ‘There are rural towns in Ireland’ that have been ‘overrun’ with immigrants, he lamented. And as a result, Ireland is ‘on the cusp’ of ‘losing its Irishness’.
Fruity language, sure. Strongly stated, no doubt. But such a deranged ‘Paddy’s Day rant’ and ‘dog-whistle’ that it required swift condemnation from both the Taoiseach and the Tánaiste? Hardly. And yet there they were, Taoiseach Micheál Martin and Tánaiste Simon Harris lining up to denounce McGregor. His remarks were ‘wrong’ and ‘do not reflect the spirit of St Patrick’s Day’, said Martin. Harris ‘didn’t mince words’, said the Irish press excitedly, after Harris said McGregor ‘doesn’t speak for Ireland’.
You don’t have to agree with McGregor’s views to be struck by the defensiveness of his voluble critics. He’s just an ‘unelected celebrity’, moaned one columnist. Sure, but so is Sally Rooney, and that doesn’t stop you from hanging on her every imperious utterance about Palestine, capitalism, yada yada. It’s true McGregor doesn’t speak for the Irish people, but the Irish people are speaking about immigration. And they’re sick of being told they shouldn’t. In the rural part of Ireland I come from it’s a daily topic of conversation. Are they dog-whistlers, too? Are those culchies likewise a ‘dismal sight’ whose ‘ill-informed’ chatter risks curdling the pints of clever Dubliners?
Here’s the thing: even as they condemned McGregor for ‘spewing out ill-informed populist tropes’, the haughty press had to admit that immigration has indeed become a testy issue in Ireland. So the Guardian slammed McGregor’s ‘rant’ but then, a few paras down, it said ‘immigration is a hot topic in Ireland’ and the justice minister has promised a ‘clampdown’ on illegal arrivals. So it’s headline-makingly awful when a shaven-headed martial artist in a tight suit says there’s too much illegal immigration in Ireland but fine when Ireland’s ruling class says it will kick illegal immigrants out? Make it make sense.
Or consider the Irish Times. It’s blubbing over Trump rolling out the red carpet for such a ruffian as McGregor and yet its own columnists have said Ireland has an immigration issue. Even its most celebrated writer, Fintan O’Toole, the moral and social opposite of McGregor in every conceivable way, has said it is ‘extraordinary’ that 20 per cent of Ireland’s current population was born outside of Ireland. That’s more than in America’s ‘melting pot’ era of the late 1800s, he pointed out, when around 15 per cent of people in the US were born elsewhere. Yet we don’t talk about it, says O’Toole, because we worry that ‘drawing attention to the scale of inward migration’ might feed ‘nativist’ fears.
And there it is, the true reason McGregor’s comments at the White House stirred up such dread among Ireland’s elites – because they fear this rough-speaking Irishman will whip other rough-speaking Irishmen into a racist frenzy. It’s fine when the immigration crisis is calmly talked about in Dublin 4, but not when it’s ‘spewed’ about by oiks, even rich oiks who visit the White House. For all the Trump-bashing of these irate columnists and politicians, it’s really their fellow citizens they fear. They hate Trump for giving McGregor the mic because they think McGregor’s ‘populist’ blather will push Ireland’s gruff masses towards nativist lunacy. Their rage against the Trump-McGregor love-in is class hatred masquerading as progressive critique.
In their eyes, Trump has done something truly unforgivable: he has platformed riff-raff opinion. By inviting his favourite Irish person to speak to the world’s press, Trump undid decades of opinion management by Ireland’s elites, where only those who went to the right universities and held the right opinions were permitted to hold forth on Irish affairs. Trump has loosened the ideological stranglehold of that coterie of smug graduate highbrows who’ve imperiously overseen Irish opinion, Irish politics and Ireland’s image for decades. The world now knows there exists Irish people who are un-PC, a tad artless, and who don’t love Hamas.
McGregor’s ‘grim, unsettling cameo’ at the White House confirms that Ireland ‘remains as vulnerable as ever to the caprices of the Trump administration’, says the Irish Times. What they mean is that Trump has just unceremoniously upended their carefully constructed image of Ireland as the wokest, bestest country on Earth. To them, McGregor is the anti-Sally Rooney: garbled where she is articulate, populist where she is bourgeois, and a self-styled tribune for the proles whereas she gets the professional classes rattling their jewellery in vivid agreement. They fret that in bigging up McGregor, Trump has weakened their cultural power. And you know what? They’re not wrong.
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy
