The Irish elites will do anything to keep Conor McGregor out of power

Another week, another blow to democracy in Europe. This time it’s in Ireland. According to the Irish Sunday Times, the government has binned plans for a directly elected mayor of Dublin because it fears the election of a swaggering populist. Well, one swaggering populist in particular: the MMA bruiser turned Trumpist braggart, Conor McGregor. It seems they’ll do anything to keep the contrarian from Crumlin out of power, including suspending democracy itself.

Ministers fear the new mayoral position could ‘become a launchpad for contentious would-be politicians such as Conor McGregor’. One says there’s a great terror of McGregor in the corridors of power. Officials are apparently scared stiff that someone like him will ‘potentially [do] well out of a Dublin mayoral election’. They fear Dubliners are more likely than other Irish folk to be ‘amenable’ to his fruity, combative politics, so they plan to deny Dubliners the right to choose him – or anyone else – to be their mayor. Save Ireland, gag its people!

How striking to hear there’s fretful whispering about McGregor ‘doing well’. Just last month, after he strutted into Trump’s White House to bemoan Ireland’s immigration levels, Ireland’s rulers assured us he does not represent Irish opinion. He’s ‘the polar opposite of what we stand for’, said Tánaiste Simon Harris. The only thing he represents, said Harris, is ‘the very worst of toxic masculinity’. Yet now we learn that the same elites that scoffed at McGregor’s political pretensions a few weeks ago are panicking that Dublin’s little people would indeed install him into power given half a chance.

It rather confirms that their dread of McGregor is really a dread of what he’s seen to represent: the oikish, rowdy, dissenting views of the less-educated dwellers of Dublin. The government is ‘reluctant to have a plebiscite’ for a Dublin mayor because it might prove to be a ‘more realistic avenue to political office for [McGregor]’, says the Irish Sunday Times. It’s the ‘pleb’ in ‘plebiscite’ they fear – the rakish beliefs of that section of Dublin society that has never darkened the door of Trinity, does not believe men can become women, and is not big on uncontrolled immigration.

For all their haughty guff about McGregor being a political outlier on the Emerald Isle, these people know that his vexed commentary, especially on immigration, chimes with much of the electorate. No, that doesn’t mean everyday Irish folk see this former cage fighter with iffy morals as a latter-day Pádraic Pearse come to deliver them from tyranny. But many will have nodded along when he lamented Ireland’s ‘illegal immigration racket’ at the press-room lectern in the White House.

Immigration is a hugely contentious issue in Ireland. It’s the moral fault line du jour. In high society in Dublin you demonstrate your virtue by singing the praises of ceaseless immigration. In the rest of the country, meanwhile, there’s angst, or certainly bewilderment, that Ireland’s foreign-born population is now heading towards a quarter of the entire population. People want to know how this happened, and why they can’t talk about it without being written off as knuckle-dragging reactionaries by city snobs.

As if defaming voters as ‘far right’ wasn’t bad enough, now the elites want to pre-emptively shut down an entire electoral avenue lest the throng use it to express their worries about immigration. In 2022, a Dublin Citizens’ Assembly, set up by the government, ruled that Dublin would benefit enormously from having a directly elected mayor. Yet it seems it won’t get one, because of the ‘directly elected’ bit; because the irritant masses might say something unacceptable, like ‘We want Conor’. It would appear that the government does not, after all, ‘trust… the people of Dublin to elect their own mayor’, says the man who chaired the citizens’ assembly.

When it comes to immigration, the instinct of Ireland’s elites is always to shut down dissent. They’ve now taken that instinct to the next, spectacularly undemocratic level, by spurning the suggestion of one of their own assemblies that there should be an expansion of democracy in Dublin. Immigration is the issue through which Irish people most keenly feel their disempowerment. It’s a thing that feels imposed on them from on high, a thing they’re feverishly demonised for talking about. And now this. Now this clear, horrible signal from the elites that democracy itself will be put on hold if you, the gross rabble, even think about using it to register your fury with the way things are.

Events in Ireland confirm that anti-populism poses the gravest threat to democracy in Europe. For all the Euro-establishment’s handwringing over how populism might upend the social order, it’s their own bitter reaction against populism that’s pushed Europe to the cliff edge of something awful. We saw this with the British elites’ ceaseless efforts to block the vote for Brexit. And with the suspension of the frontrunner candidate, Călin Georgescu, in last year’s presidential election in Romania. And with the banning of Marine Le Pen from standing in the presidential contest in France. The establishment’s dread of populism is a vastly greater menace to our continent and its political and moral virtues than populism could ever be. The elites seem to think they can ‘save democracy’ by killing it.

Would I like to see McGregor as mayor of Dublin? Not particularly. But you know what would be far worse than Dubliners choosing this scrapper to do his billionaire strut through Ireland’s halls of power? The brutish theft of such a choice by an elite that distrusts them, fears them and hates them. Give me a bad elected politician over this kingly loathing for democracy any day of the week.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy