For just under an hour on Good Friday evening Conor McGregor was given a soapbox by Tucker Carlson to air his political views and share his vision for Ireland.
The way he used it was equal parts unhinged, unnerving and wearily predictable.
It is hardly surprising that a man who made his name in MMA as a motor mouth had a lot to say.
And he was able to deliver his singular message with fluidity and even an occasional flash of good humour.
A flight to New York for €15. Is this the Trump effect on transatlantic travel?
Northern Ireland teachers in Qatar: ‘We’re 25 and middle management. A lot of friends at home are still sub teaching’
Leo Cullen under scrutiny after Leinster loss to Northampton
Ireland’s mobile saunas in danger of being killed off by red tape and bureaucratic confusion
But the over-and-backs between him and Carlson – a broadcaster deemed too much for Fox News – will have painted a picture of Ireland that will likely win him few fans close to home.
It might be a different story in the US.
Dressed like a Quiet Man-era John Wayne in a powder blue three-piece tweed suit and flat cap, McGregor cut a relaxed figure as he pushed all the buttons and blew all the dog whistles you might expect.
He talked about the “erasure of the Irish people” engineered by a corrupt government in the pocket of a shadowy globalist elite and a corrupt legacy media unwilling to speak the truth – as he sees it – to power. “Legacy media will not push facts, they push agendas,” he said to Carlson’s enthusiastic nods.
There were bizarre references to light-touch road policing for foreign nationals and State-funded car maintenance for them. He told a slack-jawed Carlson that there were no hotels left in Wexford for tourists, claiming every single one is being used to house migrants.
There was also time to discuss his determination to run for office, a US fundraising campaign for his political ambitions and his belief that the State’s security apparatus secretly share his dark perspective on the world.
The interview broadcast on YouTube started with some ominous music and a rainbow of cheap coloured graphics flashing on the screen followed by a countdown from 10 to one and then, without much by way of a preamble, McGregor started – and it is hard to find a better word here – ranting.
Here’s a taste of what he had to say in the first three or four minutes.
“Like a lot of countries in the western sphere it is being governed by, you know, people with ill intentions of its people, and you know they have not got the interests of their people at its heart.
“However, our country stays strong, our people are strong-willed, strong-minded, and we are of amazing spirit and it’s about highlighting the issues that are going on and as we have been doing. It’s turning. We will get there.
“I am not going to sit here in front of you and be all doom and gloom about the things that are going wrong, I will highlight for sure but I will highlight the solutions and the resolutions and where we are headed and keep the outlook positive
“That is what has worked for me my entire life and my entire career where I was able to rise up and do things that were once considered unattainable. You know I kept a positive outlook and that’s what I will urge my citizens and my countrymen, my fellow countrymen and women, to do and that’s what we are doing.
“You know we had a great moment in the Oval Office with President Trump where we got to speak and before the press in the White House where we got to speak our case. It was the first time it had happened in our history really, where we felt as a people someone spoke up about our issues.
“They are using intimidation tactics, they’re using bullying tactics, they are using diversion tactics, they are using public funds and public wealth to enrich private people and private industries to alter the thinking of the public and we say ‘no more’.”
There was a whole lot in that vein over the course of the hour.
Carlson’s shock when he “discovered” that to run for president McGregor would need the support of four local authorities or 20 members of the Oireachtas was almost comically transparent.
He asked why he didn’t just run for the presidency and in response was told there are “stipulations. You have to have four county councils, which are controlled by the Government parties, or you have to get 20 nominations of the Oireachtas, which are mostly party affiliates.”
“So you can’t just run?” Carlson asked as if he could scarcely believe his ears. “So how is it a democratic country?”
[ Survey of councillors shows no support for Conor McGregor presidential runOpens in new window ]
Instead of pointing out that running for the presidency in Ireland is – in fact – quite a bit easier than running for the presidency in the US, where two parties have had an effective stranglehold on the race to the White House for more than 200 years, or even reminding him that local authorities and members of the Oireachtas are democratically elected representatives of the people, he enthusiastically agreed that Ireland is not a democratic country.
The “most famous living Irishman” (sorry Bono, blame Carlson) repeated over and over and over again that Ireland is “very close to losing its Irishness”.
[ Conor McGregor is the weirdest objection yet to plans for an elected Dublin mayorOpens in new window ]
Carlson lapped it up.
“You’re saying things that the overwhelming majority of your politicians will not say,” he fawned at one point. “What do you think they’re going to do to you if you keep talking this way?”
While many Irish viewers might have answered “nothing”, McGregor had a different view.
The man who was found liable for sexual assault in a civil trial late last year – a verdict he is appealing – suggested that the shadowy forces of the State will “attempt to tarnish” his reputation – and indeed he suggested that is already happening. He even hinted the State might do more to silence him.
The interview was conducted in Dublin earlier this week by Carlson, a man who hosted an eponymously named show on Fox News until he was sacked after being named in a defamation lawsuit taken by Dominion Voting Systems against the network that cost Fox close to $800 million.
He subsequently took his talents to the Elon Musk-owned X before setting up his own Tucker Carlson Network on which the McGregor interview was broadcast.
The well of accusations of immigration diluting national identity is one Carlson’s broadcasts return to frequently, and he recently had People’s Party of Canada leader Maxime Bernier on to say mass immigration is destroying the Canadian way of life.
That was very much the theme in this broadcast, which had attracted fewer than 1,000 viewers as it began, rising to about 15,000 at its peak.
The only moment in which McGregor paused was when Carlson asked why no one was seeking to overthrow the Government, suggesting that in “a normal country people wouldn’t put up with” what has been happening in Ireland.
That was a line McGregor seemed unwilling to cross.
