It became the biggest story across the country yesterday. Conor McGregor was speaking in the White House and meeting with Donald Trump – addressing the controversial issue of immigration and perhaps setting the stage for a run for the Irish Presidency.
“What is going on in Ireland is a travesty. Our government is the government of zero action with zero accountability,” he told reporters at the White House, having said that he was in Washington “to raise the issues the people of Ireland face”. He added that villages in Ireland were being “overrun in one swoop” – and spoke about the “illegal immigration racket” referencing the enormous sums of money being paid out by the taxpayer for asylum accommodation.
How did Conor McGregor end up at the podium at the White House and meeting President Donald Trump in the Oval Office on the most prominent date on the calendar for Ireland and Irishness, St Patrick’s Day? Most likely because he’s a hugely famous MMA fighter, and Trump is an MMA fan – and because McGregor has previously spoken publicly about the negative impact of the government’s disastrous immigration policy, and Trump sees the open borders problem as another area of common ground.
But this is a case of the right issue being raised – on a huge international platform – by absolutely the wrong person.
Unprecedented levels of immigration have now led to the issue becoming an existential matter for Ireland. As my colleague Matt Treacy has shown, 23% of our population wasn’t born in this country. Demographic change is continuing at a rate of knots even as our own young people continue to emigrate because they can’t find housing and think their prospects of being able to raise a family in their own country are abysmal.
One estimate from our own Central Statistic Office is that a staggering 93% of a population increase of a million that could occur between 2024 and 2057 will consist of immigrants. Yet, the government and its establishment allies in the media and NGO sector continue to insist that more diversity and migration can only be advantageous to the Irish people.
Until recently, no debate on immigration was permitted in Ireland, apart from what was had on social media and on Gript, even when it was obvious that the effect on housing, healthcare, and services was causing real public anger and chaos. Migrant centres were forced on small towns, often at the point of a Garda baton, sometimes leaving Irish people in the minority.
The discussion was manipulated and controlled and people were bullied into silence, as commentator Robert Burke said yesterday. We were lectured about the need to attract foreign workers for our health service, for example, even when the truth is that recruitment freezes and poor working conditions pushed Irish doctors and nurses abroad even as the government is spending millions bringing workers here from overseas. Increasingly, our language and ancient culture is being shoved aside to give an absurdly subservient welcome to everyone else.
So when Micheál Martin says Conor McGregor’s remarks do not reflect the views of the people of Ireland on immigration, he’s just flat out wrong. As many of the thousands of responses to his tweet pointed, the polling has repeatedly shown that a very significant majority of Irish people feel that there are too many refugees in the country and that immigration is out of control.
The problem for an Taoiseach is that while McGregor might not be someone they like or admire, he articulated a real and pressing concern for huge numbers of Irish people. Many might also feel the fighter did a better job than Micheál Martin when an Taoiseach occupied a similarly high-profile platform in the White House last week but was reduced to acting like a tittering fool agreeing with the claim that our housing crisis was a measure of our success.
At this point, the media and political establishment can wring their hands all they like, calling McGregor a scumbag or a “dickhead”, but, in fact, their role in demonising and shouting down anyone with valid objections to the chaos of the country’s immigration policy led to precisely the vacuum that the MMA fighter is now filling.
However, let me be clear: I think Conor McGregor’s behaviour has too often been that of a degenerate – of a “rotten scumbag” as my colleague John McGuirk wrote on this platform after Nikta Hand who said the fighter brutally raped and battered her, won her civil rape case against him. The repulsive details of that trial should leave no-one in any doubt that this is not a man fit for public office. And there are other allegations to consider, such as the lawsuit filed in January of this year by a 49-year-old woman – described as a senior Wall Street vice president – who says the MMA fighter sexually assaulted her at a NBA game.
In my opinion, Conor McGregor does not represent the people who have courageously spoken up against the enormous change being foisted on Ireland by out-of-control immigration. The people in East Wall and Newtownmountkennedy and Dundrum and elsewhere, who were smeared by the media and attacked by leftists and sometimes by the Public Order Unit for questioning the government’s policy, deserve better than to have their cause associated with someone of low moral character who has been found civilly liable of sexual assault, and of assaulting an elderly man, and who has admitted to taking cocaine.
The MMA fighter may have an outsized influence and reach but he is precisely the wrong person to represent the views of the majority of people on immigration because his misdeeds are then used to smear those entirely valid views – and because he is deeply unpopular with many ordinary Irish people.
If Ireland is facing an existential crisis because of the sheer numbers of migrants coming here who do not share our values or our culture, then we’d do well to remember that those who best represented us in the past are remembered with great pride and respect not just because of their inspirational words or heroic deeds but also because of the quality of their character. Tom Clarke and Pádraig Mac Piarais and Michael Davitt and the many others who sacrificed for their country weren’t being hauled up before the courts and earning the opprobrium of the nation for their justification for behaviour a civil jury found to be sexual assault. They were people of deep and abiding principle. That’s the standard of person we’d prefer to have speaking for us.
In the days before McGregor’s St Patrick’s Day visit to the White House, public anger was also being expressed at the rape of an 18-year old girl by a 41-year-old migrant from Guyana, just days after he had sashayed into this country after being banned from the UK because of a string of convictions include for rape, kidnapping, robbery and false imprisonment.
As I wrote last week: “we were told talk of vetting was far-right – but the truth is that Randi Gladstone’s rape of an 18-year old days after he arrived is just another example of the horrendous consequences of a failure to put our own people’s safety first.”
Could Conor McGregor make the same case against the terrible outcomes of our chaotic immigration policy without being justifiably attacked by the media as a hypocrite? His positioning on this issue is being used to undermine the growing public concern regarding the direction the country is headed. And yes, its true that the media are always eager to undermine and attack anyone who stands up against their propaganda-like insistence of an ‘Ireland for All’. But most nationalists and ordinary decent people don’t want Conor McGregor associated with their cause.
McGregor was introduced at the White House by press secretary Karoline Leavitt, who said they “couldn’t think of a better guest to have with us on St Patrick’s Day”. I could think of dozens who could have articulated the verifiable harm being done to Ireland by untrammelled immigration without having the importance of their message undermined by degenerate behaviour.