Oh, how the mighty have fallen, or so one might have thought as two Irish sports stars awaited their fate in separate courtrooms in the past week. Professional fighter Conor McGregor, self-labelled the Notorious and stinking-rich exponent of the cocksure walk, weeping beside his mother in the Four Courts at the jury’s decree in a civil case that he raped a woman.
Over at the Criminal Courts of Justice, Brendan Mullin arriving solitarily and inscrutable in a quality business suit, en route to jail for an upper-class version of bank robbery. Thirty-nine years ago, the rugby player had sashayed through an adoring crowd to a victory banquet in the Shelbourne Hotel after scoring the try against England that won a rare Triple Crown for Ireland.
In the space of a single week, two sports stars were before the Irish courts having behaved more despicably than any shoplifter, bag snatcher, wretched mugger or common or garden vandal. Last Friday, McGregor was ordered to pay €248,603 to Nikita Hand for raping her. Four days later, Mullin was jailed for three years for stealing more than €500,000 from his former employer, Bank of Ireland.
That permission is ratcheted up in the sports arena where ‘physicality’, often a euphemism for manly collision and concussion, is lauded as a virtue
The two cases have come in the wake of widespread condemnation after Limerick hurler Kyle Hayes was presented with an All-Star award, following his convictions on charges of violent disorder relating to an attack on a man and, separately on a later date, for dangerous driving.
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Pure coincidence, one might say, that three homegrown sports celebrities have found themselves in the courts for committing odious offences. Sure, aren’t there bad apples in every orchard? It goes without saying that most athletes are not law breakers but what does need to be said is that the cult of fame facilitates those with a bent for illegality. As Donald Trump put it in that Access Hollywood tape when he boasted about assaulting women: “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.”
That permission is ratcheted up in the sports arena where “physicality”, often a euphemism for manly collision and concussion, is lauded as a virtue. Hayes’s trial heard that during the attack, the hurler had demanded of the injured man: “Do you know who the f**k I am?” and threatened to “dig the head off you”.
If proof of a facilitator culture was needed, it was provided during the early days of the civil case when McGregor walked out of a restaurant in Warrenpoint into a frenzy of adoring young men and boys cheering him as though he had emerged the victor in another big fight. Some fans climbed onto the bonnet of his car, pumping the air and cheering “up the McGregor”. The scene evoked the insight of Shakespeare’s Cleopatra that: “Celebrity is never more admired than by the negligent”. If your fame is stellar enough, your wrongdoing will only raise you up higher in the blinkered eyes of some fans. Little wonder that the star of the MMA ring feels entitled to go around assaulting people and expecting to become the president of Ireland.
On Elon Musk’s X, the macho-hood refused to shed its comfort blanket of make-believe. “This is only happening because he said he was going to run for president,” said one. “The war against Irish patriots must end,” said another, figuratively rolling up his sleeves. When they talked about McGregor’s victim, they called her “this bitch” and a “bimbo”.
The two men have something in common – their sense of entitlement
Mullin’s circumstances were different. He was a rugby star before the sport turned professional. His fans wore sheepskin coats and many of them are no longer in this world. He did not rape or assault anyone and, unlike McGregor, he did not amass personal wealth in the hundreds of millions of euro. Nor has his conviction elicited a fraction of the public scorn that has been directed at McGregor. Yet the two men have something in common – their sense of entitlement. Even in the amateur era, a rugby career was a path to gilded social status and a good job. As the managing director of Bank of Ireland Private Finance, Mullin perpetrated nine separate thefts in two years. That is an awful lot of no regrets, no pangs of guilt.
Ireland has an enduring love affair with its sports stars. Political parties court them to be their election candidates. One of the most sickening examples was former Ireland rugby player Davy Tweed, who was elected a unionist councillor despite having been charged with raping children and convicted for assaulting a man. When he died in a motorbike crash in 2021, his DUP colleague Mervyn Storey said Tweed was always “the first through the door” of his church. “It is well known that he had some difficult and sad times in his life and it is very upsetting to hear of his passing.” In the criminal law courts, character witnesses have an ignoble tradition of queuing up to extol athletes’ on-field prowess in ostensible mitigation for their crimes.
In the week since McGregor’s guilty verdict and in response to questions from news organisations, several supermarket chains have announced that they will no longer sell alcohol brands associated with the fighter. Airport shops are stripping their shelves of his whiskey and stout. Good PR for them, no doubt, but you have to wonder how long will McGregor be kept in commercial limbo. Only until the corporate world decides it is lucrative to embrace him once again, if the parable of Mike Tyson is anything to go by. The heavyweight boxer nicknamed the Baddest Man on the Planet is estimated to have made €20 million from his recent box-office bout with YouTube boxer Jake Paul, despite having served jail sentences for raping Desiree Washington, then 18, and for, subsequently, assaulting two motorists.
As long as it pays big bucks to forget or minimise celebrities’ crimes or to be ambivalent about them, we shall just have to go on praying for a sense of humour, as Seán O’Casey did, “so that we may laugh to shame the pomps, the vanities, the sense of self-importance of the Big Fellows that the world sometimes sends among us, and who try to take our peace away”.