Mark O’Connell’s weekly opinion. piece in The Irish Times last Saturday is a most interesting read; it’s not just about Conor McGregor, it's about what’s happening in front of our eyes, all over the world right now. Make sure to read it, a pity to miss it.
I feel a little queasy admitting this, given his total abjection as a public figure – his incessant attempts to whip up anti-immigrant sentiment; his conviction for assault; above all a High Court civil trial jury’s decision that he raped Nikita Hand – but I cannot tell a lie: I am fascinated by Conor McGregor’s unique style of speaking.
There are, no doubt, readers of this column who will feel that it is harmful, or just plain wrong, to even draw attention to the man; a large part of me can’t help but agree.
And yet I find myself helplessly intrigued by his bizarre style of self-presentation and rhetoric.
Take, for instance, a clip he posted to social media last week, in the aftermath of the fuel protests, and in advance of the failed no-confidence vote against the Government. In the video, McGregor, wearing a tracksuit top partly open over a lavishly tattooed neck and chest, stands in front of a bare brick wall, behind him a framed poster of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic and what looks like the sort of polyester Tricolour you’d buy in Carroll’s Irish Gifts.
He begins with praise of the fuel protesters and their blockade, delivered in a manner presumably intended to position him as, if not a leader (which, even for a man as deluded as McGregor, would be pushing it) then a sort of figurehead-avatar of the rising mood of anti-Government sentiment.
“Seeing the courage of our people standing together in unity against the failed rule of this Government has been incredible,” he barks, enunciating each word in his peculiarly staccato style. He refers to all manner of Government iniquities, real and perceived, from a failure to handle the cost of living and housing crises, to its “disastrous handling of immigration, that has overwhelmed our communities and services”.
The Government have treated ordinary people in a “shocking way” in recent days, he says; “their hand has been exposed, and it is a busted flush. And we, as the mighty Republic, hold all the aces.”
He goes on in this way for some time, seeming to become increasingly puffed up – his nostrils flared, his chest heaving – on his own pure and uncut verbiage, until he reaches his grand conclusion: “Ireland, for the future of our country, for our children, we must stand together in unity and complete this tackle. I love you with all my heart, every single one of you. God bless Ireland! Up the Republic!”
As always with McGregor, and with his fellow travellers in the online anti-immigrant right more generally, the question of audience immediately raises its head. Who, in other words, is this performance for?
It is, of course, explicitly addressed at Ireland – or rather “Ireland”, that beleaguered nation of patriots suffering stoically under the tyranny of a globalist Government, gathering its vital energies to rise up against oppression.
Transatlantic vernacular
But although McGregor presumably still has some kind of residual Irish fan base, this country – the actual Ireland as opposed to the “Ireland” he invokes in his speech – has very little time for him. (Memories of his sporting achievement have been almost entirely eclipsed by those serious legal issues mentioned above.) And this “God bless Ireland!” stuff is, I think, a pretty obvious tell, in that it is not something a normal Irish person would ever think to say, in either casual or political speech. It is a direct and clumsy translation, that is, of the transatlantic vernacular “God bless America”.
Watching that speech, I was reminded of another recent public appearance by McGregor, on Sean Hannity’s Fox News programme, in the run-up to Ireland’s presidential election last autumn.
In the interview, he repeatedly described himself as a “God-fearing patriot” in a “fight against evil”.
The interview also contained what seemed to me a pristine example of McGregor’s richly bizarre manner of expressing himself: “There is so much travesty taking place in Ireland that screams me to sleep at night.”
Talking to a friend the other day, I quoted this sentence as an example of McGregor’s unique rhetorical combination of orotundity, sententiousness and sheer boneheadedness.
She agreed with the description, but said that there didn’t seem to be anything unique about it; that, she said, was exactly how she would characterise the house rhetorical style of the far right. The more I think about it, the more accurate this feels to me. A true people terribly wronged, stabbed in the back by a cowardly political class, and surrounded on all sides by enemies and traitors: such is universal language of extreme nationalist movements everywhere and at all times.
The “God-fearing patriot” has never really been a presence in Irish culture to speak of. It is, as far as I can tell, a distinctly American trope. And this seems to me to suggest a larger truth about McGregor and the Irish online far right in general: that they are engaged in a performance of Irishness for the benefit of an American, and to an extent British, audience.
International reactionary energies
Their shtick is, in a sense, oddly reminiscent of the stage Irishry common on the stages of London and New York in the 19th century.
The irony, as always, with extreme nationalist movements is that they are every bit as internationalist as the globalists they identify as their enemies.
Steve Bannon’s recent claims about working to foment an Irish version of the Maga movement are a strong case in point. “I’m spending a tonne of time behind the scenes on the Irish situation to help form an Irish national party,” as he put it last year.
“They’re going to have an Irish Maga, and we’re going to have an Irish Trump. That’s all going to come together, no doubt. That country is right on the edge thanks to mass migration.”
McGregor himself, as a political force, is a nonentity. But it seems only a matter of time until a political figure comes to the fore with a capacity to draw on international reactionary energies while speaking directly to Irish people, in a language to which Irish people respond.
We often flatter ourselves that we are immune to the political maladies that have afflicted other European countries in recent years (and of course less recent years too), but it may be that we are just a decade behind the Italians, the Germans, the French.
Certainly the speed with which the anti-immigrant right took possession of certain aspects of the fuel protests last week was eerily reminiscent of the gilets jaunes movement, around which the French far right coalesced and mobilised almost a decade ago.
As Fintan O’Toole pointed out in these pages earlier this week, the fuel protests seem very likely to give rise to a more organised and energised far right in this country. And when that does happen, it will be because a leader has emerged who speaks the international far-right language of grievance, self-pity and defiance in a uniquely Irish register.
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