Dear God. Conor McGregor has announced that he will run for President of Ireland. He clearly believes the people of the South (you’re a Nordie, so you’re not allowed to vote – yes you’re Irish, but we don’t want to give people ideas about voting in an all-Ireland context)… Where was I? Ah yes – McGregor clearly believes the people of the South of Ireland are as stupid as he is.
There are conditions regarding running for president. You must be thirty-five years or older. McGregor is thirty-seven years old, so he’s OK on that criterion. However, he also needs to be nominated by at least 20 members of the Oireachtas – TDs and Senators – or by at least four local authorities. I’m banking on the fact that there are enough TDs, Senators and/or local authority members in possession of at least one brain cell, which is all you need to see that McGregor, a man convicted of rape, is not the kind of person needed in Áras an Uachtaráin. Picture the present occupant of the Áras and you’ll realise that McGregor would need a complete make-over, inwardly and outwardly, including perhaps house-training, before he’d be equipped to run.
I’ve heard people mention names – Mairead McGuinness, Fintan O’Toole, Michael McDowell, Miriam O’Callaghan. I have reservations about them all, but compared with McGregor, they are intellectual and social giants.
W B Yeats died in 1939, so he has been spared knowing of the existence of Conor McGregor. But his closing lines from The Second Coming fit perfectly to Donald Trump’s favourite Irishman.
“And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”
Punch magazine in the nineteenth century couldn’t have produced a more deformed, ape-like representative of the Irish race.
I take it you dot like him, Jude.
Disappointed with your list of possible candidates they come from the establisment or the chattering classes . I could list a few Jerry Adams , Catherine Connolly , Michelle O Neill, Charlath Burns, they are all people with a vision, principled and most líofa sa Ghaeilge or would make effort to become fluent but then they would be a loss to their present work and positions.