Garron Noone back on TikTok after backlash to online post

He had been asked by fans to give his opinion on MMA fighter Conor McGregor’s visit to the White House on St Patrick’s Day and the comments he made on immigration in Ireland.

At around 7pm on Monday the 30-year-old Co Mayo native who has 1.7m followers posted a nine-minute video and said: “I’m back. This is the last time I am going to discuss this particular topic. I really want to get back to doing what I like to do, which is just having the craic.

“But I needed to take a few days away.

There was a lot of stuff happening online as I’m sure many of you know and I just couldn’t stop myself looking at it and engaging with it and it wasn’t productive for me.

“And I think anything that I said in response to it would have purely based on emotion and just not productive.

“So, I just decided that the best thing to do was to remove myself from it for a while and just clear my head.” 

He also said he wanted to say a “massive thank you” to everyone who supported him.

He added that he didn’t want to paint anyone in a “negative light” and that people should be able to have conversations about certain topics.

“I do want to take some accountability here,” he continued.

“While I think most people seemingly to me did understand what I was trying to get across in the videos, I do think some of my points were too vague.

I think they were too open to interpretation and it is clear to me that I definitely could have communicated it better and that is 100 percent on me.

He also referenced a wave of personal attacks he was subjected particularly on X, and that he was called a racist, anti-immigrant, and a fascist. 

“There was some attempts to edit my Wikipedia page to say I was aligning myself with the far right and that I was anti-immigrant,” none of which is true, he said.

“It got very personal,” he continued. “I found that very upsetting and very hard to look at."

He clarified some of the points he made in his video five days ago, “I never said I was anti-immigration," he said.

"I never aligned myself with Conor McGregor or that I agreed with him — in fact I said the opposite.

"I never said immigrants are criminals or immigrants are making our crime rates shoot to all-time heights, I never said any of that stuff”.

He added that Conor McGregor was making inaccurate statements — including that Dublin had gone from one of the safest cities in Europe to one of the most dangerous — and that such statements cause hysteria.

Rural communities are also not “having their voices heard” he continued.

“Denying the reality that people have these concerns leaves a massive vacuum open for people like Conor MacGregor to come in an occupy and spread messages that I know you don’t want him to spread — that was the entire point of my video, and I stand by that,” he said.