Ireland views immigration as a moral issue — one it owes the world, given how much of Ireland the world has absorbed.

What a day it was. Early in the morning Northern Ireland’s Rory McIlroy won the playoff to secure the PGA Player’s Championship.

Then the MMA fighter and recently criminally convicted Conor McGregor showed up to the White House and aired his country’s dirty laundry in front of the world. He complained about the government being non-responsive to the problems of mass immigration and crime, and hoped that the United States would continue to be a “Big Bro” to Ireland and protect it. Irish government officials spent the afternoon insisting that McGregor is a convicted rapist and does not speak for anyone in Ireland.

John McGuirk, writing at his scrappy new media outlet Gript.ie, speaks about Ireland’s new image problem:

Put it another way: How many Irish people know the name of the Prime Minister of Portugal? Now, ask yourself, if Cristiano Ronaldo was to take to social media to denounce the immigration policies of the Portuguese Government and say that the Portuguese Government was running his country into the ground, you’d probably hear about it, right? That’s the kind of status McGregor has in the United States, for Ireland.

The Irish Government has another problem: Most Irish people might not accept Conor McGregor as their messenger, but a good many will agree with the basic thrust of the message: Polls have consistently shown massive public concern here about immigration numbers, with the number of people saying immigration is too high consistently topping 70%. And now, here’s McGregor, embarrassing the country on the international stage by saying something that many people instinctively believe to have at least the whiff of truth.

What’s difficult for Ireland is that this is not just a self-inflicted image problem, but one that is not really self-admitted. Ireland has a small-nation psychology and has, at least since its independence, flattered itself as a moral power on the world stage, even if its moral worldview has changed. Ireland views immigration as a moral issue — one it owes the world, given how much of Ireland the world has absorbed.