Mick Clifford: The land of a hundred thousand welcomes — and unwelcome truths
US president Donald Trump Conor McGregor in the Oval Office of the White House on Monday. Picture: X/@POTUS
Ireland is not what it used to be in the global imagination. Different versions of this country were writ large over the week in which the national holiday is celebrated.
Micheál Martin presented the old-fashioned, and for the greater part, factually accurate narrative of Ireland when he went to the USA. He mingled with elements of Irish America, did his bit for trade and diplomacy and smiled anxiously through a close encounter with Donald Trump. Job done, but who noticed on the far side of the Atlantic? His visit made a few headlines, but not that many and it happened nearly a week before the big day.
On Paddy’s Day itself, Conor McGregor was the Irishman at the White House, flagging his imminent arrival on X (formerly Twitter) with the following tweet. “I land shortly in Washington for the most important meeting of my countries future.”
It is unclear whether his spelling was haywire or he was suggesting that Ireland and the USA both qualify as being his country. “I am more than ready,” he wrote, sounding like a man who was about to undertake a mission that was bigger than himself, bigger than perhaps anything attempted by the millions who had crossed the ocean before him. And all in the name of faux patriotism.
McGregor, who was found guilty of assault in a civil rape case, has 10m followers on X.
In a highly unusual move for a visitor to the White House, he was given space in the press room, standing at the podium that is familiar to the world. He relayed what’s gone wrong in Ireland, where there is, he claims, a government — elected last November — with “zero accountability”.
“Our money is being spent on overseas issues that has nothing to do with the people of Ireland,” he told the press. “The illegal immigration racket is running ravage on the country, there are towns and villages that are being overrun in one swoop.”
He warned Irish Americans that they needed to hear this “because if not there will be no place to come home and visit.”
His diatribe might have come from the mouth of Donald Trump, with its insults of immigrants and echoes of Trump’s “carnage in American cities.”
Among those who spread McGregor’s message was Elon Musk, who has 70m followers on X, which he owns, and which he has engineered to amplify the kind of messages that he, Trump, and McGregor disseminate. Later in the week, McGregor continued his tour of the US when he dined with the Attorney General of Texas, a state with the eighth largest economy in the world. To millions of Americans, McGregor is the kind of personality that Ireland needs right now to save the country, just as Trump has saved America. We are indeed lucky that calls to allow all Irish passport holders a vote in Irish presidential elections have fallen on deaf ears.
If McGregor is the man purporting to answer Ireland’s call stateside, back at home a different image of the oul sod was being projected. An Israeli man visiting this country was spat on in a bar in Dun Laoghaire. Tamr Ohayon and another person were confronted by two women, Lena Seale and Zeina Ismail, who had been involved in pro-Palestinian campaigns. Seale was a candidate for People Before Profit in last year’s local elections.
In footage uploaded onto social media, the two women can be seen approaching Olayon and gesturing to him with their middle fingers, telling him: “Zionists are not welcome in Ireland”. Later Ismail can be seen spitting at Olayon, whose apparent crime was he served in the Israeli Defence Forces, which is obligatory in Israel.
The story and the footage went around the world, not just on social media but ended up in newspapers as far away as New Delhi. Dana Erlich, the Israeli ambassador to Ireland — until she was withdrawn in protest — tweeted that “this is how the ‘land of a hundred thousand welcomes’ treats Israeli tourists. A shocking example of the anti-Israeli & antisemetic environment that has been permitted to develop in Ireland.”
The whole episode fed into a growing narrative that this country is antisemetic, that the solidarity widely expressed with the plight of the Palestinians is rooted in simple hatred of Jews. This has been vehemently rejected across society. In the USA, the Taoiseach met Jewish leaders to impress on them the true nature of this country’s position on the slaughter in Gaza. But which image of the land of 100,000 welcomes has gone viral? The one uploaded in glee by an extremist element on the fringes, or the official and accurate version sold by Micheál Martin? On Tuesday, Seale was interviewed on Newstalk where she was completely unrepentant about what she had engaged in.
The relentless bombing of Gaza is an outrage of gigantic proportions. The resumption of the bombing this week occurred at a time when the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, now a wanted war criminal, was due to give evidence at his corruption trial in Tel Aviv, heightening the sense that the wholesale murder is, at least in part, motivated by base politics.
Surely allowing this country to be cast as harbouring the kind of hatred that led to the Holocaust is about as dumb a thing as it is possible to do right now.
Despite Martin’s competent performance in Washington, the images that disseminated across the world depict Ireland as a place that variously needs some far right buffoon to rescue it and retrieve its loss of identity and control under the current government, to a place where the most ancient form of bigotry is alive and thriving.
That’s how the world works today. The extremes, through social media, have the capacity to amplify biases, bury facts and inflame anger to the point where they fashion a narrative totally at odds with any verifiable truth. And there is no problem finding a market for this kind of corruption. Look no further than the reality that a large minority of the USA’s 300m inhabitants believe that the 2020 presidential election was, for the first time in US history, stolen from the real winner. This belief, for which there is zero evidence, originated through nothing more than Donald Trump saying and repeating it was so on social media.
Such a milieu is ideal for extremists to spread their hate of one form or another. Thankfully, the extremes of all hue remain a small minority in this country so far, but the thrashing of Ireland’s reputation in the week that was shows how easily the truth can be smothered these days and a false narrative held up as the real truth.
