Irish Examiner view: White House meeting of the utter disgraceful
US president Donald Trump with UFC fighter Conor McGregor in the Oval Office of the White House on Monday. Picture: X/@POTUS
The meeting of US president Donald Trump and MMA fighter Conor McGregor in the White House on St Patrick’s Day has already been parsed in a dozen different ways.
It could be seen as the ultimate expression of "the cruelty is the point", a term applied to many of the actions taken by the Trump administration.
Rather than suiting an ideological agenda or a long-term strategic goal, a gesture such as hosting McGregor has relevance only in as far as it creates dismay and revulsion in Ireland.
That is not overstating the case. McGregor came to prominence as a cage fighter, but is now best known in Ireland because of a civil case taken against him last year.
In December 2024, a jury in Dublin found him guilty of sexual assault in that civil case, which was brought by a woman who accused him of raping her at a Dublin hotel in December 2018. She was awarded nearly €250,000 in damages.
His host has a similar background. In 2023, Trump was found liable by a jury in a New York court of sexual abuse in 1996 and was ordered to pay his victim $5m. The expression "aithníonn ciaróg ciaróg eile" was never more apt.
The message sent out by pictures of this summit of sex offenders is horrific; the images are a slap in the face of women everywhere. The track records of the two men involved are so shameful that it is difficult to say which of them is less suited to high office, or indeed any office.
Some of the commentary surrounding this has sought to depict it as an insult to the Taoiseach, who was hosted in the White House last week, or to the Irish people as a whole.
This is a gross misreading: McGregor’s visit to the White House was an insult to decent people everywhere.
As reported here this week by Cormac O’Keeffe, Ireland lacks a formal State structure to counter disinformation and foreign influence, a major lacuna in our defence architecture.
It is a matter of particular concern given that known Russian and Chinese “influence networks” made over 7,500 posts about Ireland on social media in the last year, according to a European intelligence report.
While Ireland receives less interest from Russian networks than other European countries covered by the report, we receive proportionally more interest from Chinese networks.
On that basis the sooner the National Counter Disinformation Strategy Working Group reports the better —it was first due to report a year ago but we still await its deliberations.
That said, we hardly need a national working group to point out that social media is itself part of the problem.
A recent book, by Sarah Wynn-Williams, offers a scathing appraisal of the social media giant Facebook, where Wynn-Williams worked for several years.
The author blames Facebook for helping the military leaders of Myanmar to post hate speech online, which in turn helped to drive the attempted genocide of the Muslim minority in the country.
She also claims that Facebook — now Meta, which in turn owns Instagram and WhatsApp — identified teenage girls who deleted selfies from its platforms and then supplied data to companies to target those girls with ads for diet or beauty products.
Using various means of communication for propaganda purposes is not new. This has been a weapon in the arsenals of many countries over hundreds of years.
It is difficult, however, to think of a means of communication as inherently toxic and liable for abuse than some of our social media platforms. That does not mean we should ignore the manipulations of foreign states, of course— we should take all necessary steps to protect ourselves. But with the platforms themselves, the medium truly is the malevolence.
Amazon.ie has officially been launched in Ireland — the Irish storefront for the online retail giant has been in the works ever since it opened its first fulfilment centre in Dublin three years ago, and this week the Ireland-specific branch of its online business comes into operation.
According to Amazon, this means one-day delivery for Irish customers, who will avoid certain customs charges. The company stated that it will have a page on its site as part of a collaboration with Enterprise Ireland.
The company is a significant employer in Ireland — approximately 6,500 people in Cork, Dublin, and Drogheda work for Amazon — and changes in consumer habits were turbocharged by the online purchasing boom in the pandemic, so Amazon is clearly fulfilling a need here.
However, questions remain about the implications of Amazon for the Irish economy.
The decline of the traditional department store has been linked to the e-commerce revolution, and two major department retailers left the Irish market in recent years: Debenhams in 2020 and Argos in 2023 — the latter’s departure in particular ascribed to online competition.
Smaller operations also tend to lose out when competing with Amazon.
The website was originally founded to sell books, for instance, and independent bookstores have been particularly hard-hit by the company. It has been pointed out repeatedly that small local businesses keep their profits in the local economy, while Amazon’s profits fund owner Jeff Bezos’s supervillain cosplay.
Something to consider before clicking on that same-day delivery option.
