Could Conor McGregor be running for President?
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After I left studio here yesterday and I was making my way out to Virgin Media Television in Ballyment, I passed the Black Forge Inn and I saw a nice big black Rolls Royce outside and I thought Conor Lenehan must be in there driving his Rolls Royce. The former minister at Fianna Fáil TD. He was in there. It wasn't your Rolls Royce, Conor, was it? It definitely was not mine. I think it was a Bentley. Oh, a Bentley, was it? It definitely wasn't mine anyway. I don't know.

You were in there. I was, yeah. I went up. Village Magazine, the editor, Michael Smith, is a great investigative journalist. And he sort of allowed me to go up and have a look at people, what's going on up there. And it was a very interesting evening. Obviously, Conor McGregor is a very controversial figure in many ways.

And he's made these commentary before the Dublin riots and afterwards around the issue of migration. And so it was kind of interesting to see there were a lot of different factions up there. That's the thing that struck me first, that the Conservative or right side of the political equation are very independent.

incessantly fighting and subject to infighting. There seem to be about four or five groups now that are relatively, I won't say toxic, but they're fighting with each other. So this is a cause of great frustration. Quite a few people came up to me saying we could do with someone like you to sort out the political nature of, it seems to be quite inchoate on that side. And I think

many of the people there were sort of hoping that MacGregor would become some sort of saviour for the right of centre anti-immigration platform. And to be honest with you, I feel very angry on this show and many other shows over the years where people start labelling people either racist or far right because it doesn't really exist in Ireland, that level of toxicity. Thankfully, still over immigration, I think you've had some terrible incidents in terms of the torturing of reception centres

And to my mind, it's something that people need to talk much more about because it's interacting very badly, the immigration crisis with the housing crisis and the other state-provided services that you were speaking about. Okay, there's quite a bit to unpack there. Let's talk about the label, first of all. I mean, left and right, I mean, these labels and the definition of what they represent is a product of the French Revolution. So I'm not sure how applicable they are today. Nevertheless...

There is a value and certainly some people are tarred with that brush unfairly. But there is a value in having some sort of label for people who are at the extreme end of the spectrum, aren't they? For people who are torching reception centres. Well, that's what I would call sort of a form of anarchism. I mean, I think to dignify it as being an ideology, and that's one of the key points I suppose I would attempt to make when I write this piece for The Village Magazine is that, you know, we've had

Phenomenon like this before, opposition to methadone clinics. When I was a TD out in Talla, you had many, one of which was torched during my time there. You had the same controversy over traveller accommodation in a previous era where literally people went at pitchforks, poor, vulnerable travellers. So I would liken that

annoyance over the reception centre is more to that phenomenon rather than dignifying it with a kind of a political ideological basis. Well, quite clearly last night up at the Black Forge there were a number of people I think who would have the aspiration to make a significant political issue out of this by evolving a strong national party like the ones you have in France and

UK or elsewhere. But Ireland's been very strangely resistant to that kind of thing. And I don't want to be scoring points against Cumann na Ghael or Fine Ghael, but they tried it in 1932 in terms of under Owen O'Duffy. It didn't work. And it does look to me like that the Irish public are kind of not so much, not so much hostile, but they're less likely to go down that path. The...

The division within that particular cohort, as you said, there were different factions, as you described them, who were there. Like, what's the nature of the disagreement between them? Is it ideological? Is it policy? Is it just personality? I think some of it's personality, some of it's ego, and some of it's, like, what form, you know, in classically...

If you look at the left side of the spectrum, you've got the communists, you've got anarchism beyond that. And then you come back to social democracy. And, you know, we have the Greens, the Labour, all the different left-wing parties we have in Leinster House and independence, people before profits. Fianna Fáil, of course, famous left-wing party, as described by Bertie, you heard? Yes, yeah. And I would still classify that myself as a kind of social democratic party in its cultural mix or whatever. But

I think that on the right you have these classic divisions between monarchical and the continent. And that doesn't happen here because we're a public office, so we're saved that one. But you have people who are libertarian, obviously, the libertarians. And then more recently with the arrival of Trump in the United States, you've got a very strong intellectual strain on the right about big state intervention. That was previously not...

the case many years ago. But, you know, there's quite a lot of thinking. And I think sometimes people dismiss Trump without looking at some of the ideas that people are championing that work with them and behind them. So that's definitely happening. I suppose people are going to be, I suppose Tucker Carlson arrived here yesterday. They might be disappointed. I'm not sure there's a huge appetite for that. We seem to have evolved centrist parties. I think Sinn Féin now could even be classified as almost a centrist party.

Well, I think I heard somebody make a remark and they're probably not a million miles from the truth when they say the Sinn Féin today is actually resembles in policy terms the Bertie Ahern Fianna Fáil party to a large degree. They've kind of eaten their dinner. That's definitely said within FF and was very much the case prior to the last election. But it does seem that

when that was first said, there was a certain validity to it in relation to the North of Ireland and attitudes to that. But now that the North of Ireland is solved or in transition in some kind, it's less so the case. And certainly Sinn Féin are more definitively a left-wing party now than they were

when they started in the back or the aftermath of the peace process. That is a striking difference now between them and Fianna Fáil and, of course, Fianna Gael as well. Why do you think we never developed then in this country a tradition of...

further out on the spectrum, on the right. That's been obviously a great disappointment to kind of what I would call left-wing intellectuals and indeed some right-wing conservative intellectuals. I hate to say that it's an anti-intellectual strain in the country, but I think in fact it is. It's a sort of, the fact that we won our independence in

from a broadly defined old style Sinn Féin which then morphed into Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael because of a civil war. You broadly have a kind of a desire for stability and to be in the centre of the political equation rather than entertaining men.

drastic moves to the left right I think it's probably in the country itself because I know a friend of mine often comments that Ireland is essentially culturally middle brow it's neither high brow or low brow and this acts as a great frustration to people who would like us to be more low brow as well as to be more high brow you know as they say it's whether you like Proust or not you know there's not a great appetite people in Ireland prefer their GA their sport their

horse racing, whatever, you know. The national pastimes certainly reflect a kind of culturally middle ground. That's sort of reflected in the political system as well. Yeah. Some people can't live with it because intellectually they're frustrated. Immigration was always a great release valve as well, wasn't it? That you didn't have a cohort of

angry, young, disenfranchised people in the country looking for a cause. We had those people, but they were on Bondi Beach or whatever it happened to be. That's right, yeah. And look, certainly there's more definition if you look at the Dáil now in terms of the gradation of left and right or conservative versus progressive, whatever way you want to describe it. But the...

The real, I suppose, story of Ireland in recent years is one of modernisation. So quite often modernisation throws up this kind of central, how would you call it, consensus-driven type political system where there isn't an awful lot of difference between the two competing clans or parties.

numbers of players. So the only interesting feature of the last few years is the emergence of Sinn Féin and that you now have a fragmented political system in four, you know, independence, Sinn Féin, Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil. And at some stage, people will probably try to consolidate that again because the fragmentation itself is not always helpful, you know, particularly when you're approaching a crisis. And we may be, in fact, doing that now. We may be on the cusp of a recession or whatever. So,

What was the mood like in the pub last night around a possible tilt at the presidency from Conor McGregor? I know he was interviewed by Tucker Carlson kind of in a room on their own, so we don't know what was said and that'll ultimately be put up online for everybody to watch if they want. But did he talk about it at all? Did other people talk about it? Yeah, lots of people in the room were talking about that. And of course, one of the problems here is like whether he would get a nomination or not. You know, there was an Irish Times server there recently of county councillors and

Few, if any, were prepared to do it. The nomination mechanism is quite tricky. They all said no, except one who didn't quite say yes either. I think they just said, I'll wait until the party calls. The political parties were very generous to what we might call minority or community type candidates.

in the last two contests where the local authorities didn't support them. Well, certainly the time before that. They facilitated people getting into the race. Michael Dee's first run, there was quite a few independent. Eddie Roach got one. Derek Nally got one. I think by the time the last election, the county councils were getting a bit more circumspect. You had, I'm not even going to dignify the, well, Gemma O'Doherty had kind of Kevin Sharkey and a few other people who went for it.

who didn't get nominations. So there was a kind of a change in attitude, I think, between both of those campaigns. Yeah, I don't know whether it was cynical to have as many in the contest as possible so that the classic insider scenario would win if you have plenty of candidates. And I would say, given the fragmentation that's occurring, it may seem attractive. I don't know. I can't predict, obviously, that the political parties might facilitate the entry of a lot of candidates. I doubt they'll facilitate McGregor, though, will they? No.

I can't see it. I mean, if you take the Irish Times, pulling up the councillors, you can't, you couldn't. I said in the Irish Times today, I didn't think it was likely. Yeah. He's not likely to get it. But I suppose at the end of the day, he's managed to surface the big issue that people, I think, do want addressed, which is immigration. There is an issue out there in the public. And that's why I started in our talk here.

that we have to stop demonising people who raise legitimate issues and questions. I mean, the amounts of money being spent on refugee housing are truly astounding. I think the way any other research does, it's up over the billion, 1.43 billion in 24. So that's a huge amount of money when we are still at the same time trying to build permanent accommodation as opposed to temporary accommodation outcomes for people like this. But I think...

Most people, if you ignore the extremes we talk about, the people, you know, who are torching reception centres and then maybe people extreme on the other end who don't believe in national borders. Most people are kind of somewhere in the middle. They do want a robust system, but they want it to be fair. And that's what the government talks about. And actually, the government have kind of acknowledged that it can't

it was broken. Otherwise, they wouldn't have changed anything. And they have changed things. They've added a lot of countries to the so-called safe list. They've more robust checks at ports and airports. They're kind of going after deportations a little bit

more vociferously, although, you know, people might want that to be ramped up again. Well, I think it has to be. Yeah, I do think it has to be. I mean, I'm not, you know, famously at one stage, I was Minister for Integration many years ago, the first such minister in the state. And I said there couldn't be integration without deportation. You can't have a happy, clappy world where one of those things is abolished, as in deportation. You know, people haven't a right or entitlement here. And it's amazing the number when you look at these asylum determinations, when they go negative,

The people disappear. So you often get people complaining there aren't enough deportations. But by definition, people who don't have a right to appear tend to disappear. But you know what always amazes me, though, in this debate and discussion is how much focus there often is on, say, ports and airports and people destroying their documents. And why can we not turn them around? And we almost never mention the border with the north.

and about 90% of our asylum seekers apparently come from the north and you speak to people who work in the system and they say when we talk about people disappearing what we often mean is they head back north of the border and they disappear into the UK. That's correct. So they're actually not here anymore most of them. No, no, they're not here and so look sometimes you get unbalanced commentary saying well

He, the minister in this case, is issuing deportations, but they're not actually, the numbers fall very small on the actual number of people. That's because literally back in my own time, and I don't think it's much different now, when you don't succeed in getting or accessing the benefits that Irish welfare and other entitlements that are extended to legitimate claims, then they do disappear. And there's also, we have to be clear about this, that

Ireland's social welfare model, I'm not criticising, but it's so generous that if you cast your mind back to the time of the Ukraine war, when the Ukrainian refugees started arriving, some of those Ukrainian refugees were actually deliberately not checking in in France or the continental countries because word went out that the level of provision was very generous. And now you see a fall, actually, in the application numbers. And I think Jim O'Callaghan, who's recently come in, has upped the ante in terms of

They have reduced those entitlements significantly. And also increasing deportation because unfortunately when the traffickers and there are like we always talk about people coming here but you know an awful lot of the people who are coming and making claims are actually trafficked and you know that's a kind of an ugly underbelly right across the world and we need to tackle that. I know in Britain they're trying to get European security cooperation this year. We had

the famous, what do you call them, passports, biometric passports have been introduced and of taking, I know there was some liberal opposition to the idea of taking fingerprints of people who come in and make these claims, but that is helpful because you can't have people hop, skipping and jumping across different jurisdictions. You know your contention though that immigration, it's a thing that people want sorted, that people want to talk about and at least maybe MacGregor has highlighted that issue.

Before the general election, polling was done and actually immigration had fallen way down the table of people's priorities, you know, when they were asked. And, you know, there was maybe a little ripple in local elections from anti-immigration candidates. The same tiny ripple maybe at European elections almost disappeared by general election time, actually. It would suggest that

It gets talked about an awful lot more than it should, actually. Despite the contention that we need to talk about this more, actually, maybe we're doing the opposite. Maybe we're talking up a problem here that doesn't exist. No, no, no, look, I wouldn't wish to talk it up at all. I'm the last person in the world who would like to do that. But I think there is a real issue there, particularly because of housing and the level of provision, non-provision in housing. So I think inevitably it's going to have to be done. And I think from my own period as Minister of Integration,

The public do want it well managed. They want a well managed border. They don't like the site. I mean, clearly, who could approve of this idea of people, you know, being in tents in public areas along the canal or elsewhere around the country. So, you know, it's something we'll have to deal with. But as well as that, look, I think, I hope people don't start criticising the minister when he really does get tough on this one about deportation and driving those numbers down. Because really, if that's not done, well then, you know,

We just open ourselves up for all sorts of problems in the country, you know. Listen, Conor, thanks a million for coming in to us. So The Village is where that article is going to appear ultimately. Conor Lanahan, former minister, former Fianna Fáil TD.