A GLOBAL icon for whom the only constraint is none whatsoever, who wears his vulgarity, bombast and disregard for humility as a badge of honour, what does MMA star and currently Ireland’s most famous son represent if not the moral void in which sits the values of an American Dream that stand as a grotesque perversion of the human condition?

Nietzsche’s “will to power” is embodied in the rise of Conor McGregor from a working-class housing estate in Dublin to the summit of fame and the riches of a latter day Crassus; riding the wave of a sport, mixed martial arts, which acquaints with the most primal of our origins, rooted in brute cruelty and a thirst for glory that must needs can only be satiated at the expense of others.

From a distance, McGregor appears to be living the “dream” —  which has it that holds that the summit of human happiness, meaning and value is a place of unbounded fame, riches and, with it, the licence to proclaim: “Fuck you” to the world of mere mortals that lies beneath and from you have escaped.