If the Government in Dublin is not sitting up and paying attention to Conor McGregor’s appearance at the White House yesterday afternoon, it is making a horrendous mistake.
Not, mind you, because McGregor’s pretensions to Irish electoral success in the Presidential Election later this year will come to anything – I would happily wager with any reader that he won’t even secure a nomination for the ballot paper – but because of the international audience he commands.
There’s an old saying somewhere that prophets tend to be rejected in their own land. If anybody wishes to assign prophetic status to Conor McGregor, then that is one criterion that he absolutely meets on all counts: Yes, for some people he has cult status here. But for many, many more, he is a loudmouth with a hot head and a civil finding against him in the Irish courts holding him responsible for rape. What’s more, before any of that became a problem for him, he had a general image problem at home tied – ironically enough – to the very reasons for his popularity in the United States.
Whether we like it or not, “Irishness” as an idea in the US is still deeply tied to racial and cultural stereotypes. I present to you the badge for North America’s most popular American Football College Team, the Notre Dame Fighting Irish. It is not unfair to say that the image therein bears more resemblance to Conor McGregor than it bears to Simon Harris or Micheál Martin. Remember Donald Trump’s words of praise for Ireland to Micheál Martin just last week: “Great fighters, the Irish”
Indeed, as I have written before, any Irish person who spent any amount of time in the United States in the twenty-teens will have encountered a basic reality: When you tell a local that you are from Ireland, the first and often only thing they would mention to you is how much they loved Conor McGregor.
So Micheál Martin can tell the world as much as he wants that Conor McGregor doesn’t speak for Ireland. The problem is that for tens of millions of Americans – and likely tens of millions of other people around the world, Conor McGregor absolutely does speak for Ireland. He might actually be the only Irish person they know.
Put it another way: How many Irish people know the name of the Prime Minister of Portugal? Now, ask yourself, if Cristiano Ronaldo was to take to social media to denounce the immigration policies of the Portuguese Government and say that the Portuguese Government was running his country into the ground, you’d probably hear about it, right? That’s the kind of status McGregor has in the United States, for Ireland.
The Irish Government has another problem: Most Irish people might not accept Conor McGregor as their messenger, but a good many will agree with the basic thrust of the message: Polls have consistently shown massive public concern here about immigration numbers, with the number of people saying immigration is too high consistently topping 70%. And now, here’s McGregor, embarrassing the country on the international stage by saying something that many people instinctively believe to have at least the whiff of truth.
We should not under-estimate the tribal instinct here, in either direction. On the one hand, many people will believe that Conor McGregor has committed the unforgivable sin of airing the country’s dirty laundry in public. On the other hand, a good many might blame the Government for the existence of that dirty laundry in the first place. Just because the Irish people have no intention of electing McGregor as their President, that does not mean that they are going to rally around Mssrs Martin and Harris.
But these are downstream consequences, and it will take many months for any domestic impact from McGregor’s comments to become apparent. Internationally, the problem is much greater.
Think about how you consume news, and think back to the Ronaldo example above: If one of the world’s two most famous footballers (a man, incidentally, with his own accusations from allegedly wronged women) denounced the Portuguese Government for turning Portugal into a terrible place, ask yourself how much time you would devote to finding out the truth. I suspect for most people the answer is “not much”. Instead, I suspect you would simply file the information away under a rough heading in your head: “Something bad must be going on in Portugal”.
That is how tens of millions of people will greet the McGregor thing yesterday: “Something bad must be going on in Ireland”.
For a country that trades so much on its international reputation, this kind of bad PR is a real problem. The world’s most famous Irishman is essentially telling the world that Dublin is a kip, that our hotels are full of migrants, that we have a crime problem, and that the Government is out of touch with the public. And what’s worse, there is plenty of evidence if people do go looking for it that tends to back up his assertions.
That’s the Government’s problem to fix. Whining about McGregor and saying he doesn’t speak for Irish people might address the domestic problem. But it doesn’t make anything that McGregor said any less true, or relevant.