I have been enjoying a recent spate of arguments with my friends over who can claim the mantle of the most famous living Irish person. Paul Mescal? Gladiator II helps but outside of Ireland and London, he is just not that famous. St Patrick? Sure, but very much not living so put him in the lot with Joyce and Beckett and De Valera (Joyce outstrips the other two by miles). Liam Neeson was suggested, to an unfortunate chorus of scoffs. Rory McIlroy, 19th on the Forbes list of best paid athletes this year? The truth is that there is no towering figure in sport or culture, ubiquitous and recognised everywhere. The accolade of the most famous living Irishman used to go to Bono. The answer now may be much worse.
Conor McGregor has a claim to the title over recent years. In 2021, he was the highest paid athlete in the world, according to Forbes (beating Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo); since his debut in the UFC in 2013 he has become the most watched fighter in the company’s stable, coasting to the top of the pay-per-view events. The UFC has genuine global reach, and a captive audience in the shape of Donald Trump’s cabinet. McGregor is the biggest star in mixed martial arts history. And on the less salient metrics he has 47.3 million followers on Instagram and 10.6 million on X.
It is an unpleasant thing to accept. Who would want McGregor as one of their most famous national exports? His ugly political language – “Ireland, we are at war”, “there is grave danger upon us” – is straight out of the far right’s playbook; it’s not mere political agitation but learned behaviour from the online extremes of the movement. And now a jury in a civil case has found that McGregor raped Nikita Hand in a Dublin hotel in 2018, there is no escaping the breadth and depth of the man’s moral vacuity.
It is a shameful thing that a figure of such profound personal failings, with such thuggish rhetoric, is a global Irish figure. Before him, Bono was Ireland’s truest global superstar. In response, the country spent years casting the rockstar as a risible egoist; a man with ideas above his station; a monument to national cringe. Now there is a real embarrassment about one figure wearing an Irish flag on a global stage, all that time sniggering at Bono makes us look very weak indeed.
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In 2002, Time magazine ran a cover with Bono draped in an American flag – channelling some kind of superhero posture – with the strap line “Can Bono save the world?” It was derided as delusional, egomaniacal and credulous nonsense. It was a perfect case study in a simple journalistic principle, too: if a question is posed in a headline the answer is usually “no”. Of course Bono – no matter the scope of his influence, rubbing shoulders with Tony Blair and George Bush, David Trimble and John Hume, Bill Gates – could not “save the world” (as though it is even an easily defined mission with a stable end point).
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At most, a rockstar can tinker around the margins. And that’s what he did, advocating for debt forgiveness in Africa, lobbying Bush to provide for African AID relief, joining forces with equally earnest Bob Geldof, somehow involving himself in the peace process. None of this is beyond criticism – philanthropy is an imperfect tool. But Bono, as the frontman of one of the biggest bands of all time, could have squandered that influence for a life of moral lasciviousness. That in many ways could have preserved his reputation. Fintan O’Toole wrote in these pages on Bono’s 60th birthday that the rockstar could have escaped his fate as one of Ireland’s most mocked men by having the politeness to die young like Phil Lynott or Rory Gallagher.
The country was so put off and embarrassed by Bono’s oppressive sincerity; his capacity for great earnestness. This fear of sincerity is a very teenage affliction – a cohort afraid to try (so uncool!), preferring aloof insouciance over genuine effort. You hope to grow out of this inhibiting attitude by your early 20s. Ireland as a nation is still burdened by it: faster to laugh at Bono (convincing itself that this is a mere facet of Irish “banter”) than to think that we could have worse national ambassadors. It’s insecure cynicism masquerading as lighthearted scepticism.
What does it say about us that Bono was laughed out of the room while McGregor was – until recently, as his house of cards finally collapses – basically ignored, tolerated or in some cases lionised? There was a permissiveness as he was dismissed as a plucky fighter with poor manners and a refusal to adhere to social graces and mores. A maverick, a renegade, someone with no interest in taking to the stage of the World Economic Forum, who would never think to rub shoulders with the global elites. Unfortunately those poor manners were something much darker. But Bono? Ugh, doesn’t he have notions!