Eddie liked to live it large but never lost his decency..he was the opposite of McGregor

F1 icon would have been a far greater ambassador for Ireland in White House than self-serving bully

- ROY CURTIS

IF we imagine the White House as a heart monitor for the civility of life on our planet, then the moment Conor McGregor was welcomed like a crown prince surely slowed the pulse to a crawl.

A moment when hope and virtue all but flatlined.

It is difficult to envision a more vulgar, unsettling or repulsive backbeat to the St Patrick's Day celebrations.

A world with a crying heart hardly required Donald Trump, Elon Musk and Ireland's most derided celebrity in the one room, bulldozing through the walls of decency as - without even a hint of a mandate - they pondered this nation's future.

Joe Brolly was hardly alone in noting the beyond-satire irony of McGregor using his pulpit at America's seat of power to launch a loudhailer lament about "zero accountability" for crime in Ireland.

As Brolly noted on his Free State podcast: "I mean, this is a man who's been found liable for a brutal sexual assault, who was captured on video punching an old man in the face in his bar, who went on a rampage on New York and was fined and sentenced for that rampage whenever he was trying to conceal his terror of [Khabib] Nurmagomedov by acting big"

It was by some measure the biggest and most disconcerting story of the first part of the week.

Then on Thursday came the terribly sad news that Eddie Jordan had passed through the final chicane in his battle with cancer and taken the chequered flag in the great race of life.

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And a thought struck: How different might the day have been if the Pennsylvania Avenue visitor had been the roguish, kind, immensely smart and effortlessly popular Jordan, custodian of what the late, legendary voice of F1, Murray Walker, called a "loveable Irish charm"?