In a boxing club with ties to Conor McGregor, some non-white and immigrant athletes seek to connect and belong

Ayser Nehar burst into a small room on Friday, a floor above a boxing ring and dangling fat punching bags at Crumlin Boxing Club on Windmill Street. 

His face and shaved head glisten with sweat. He’s standing in front of Philip Sutcliffe Snr – former boxer, twice Olympian, ex-military man and now independent Dublin city councillor. 

Nehar’s wearing a t-shirt embroidered on its chest with “McGregor Sports & Entertainment”. 

Sutcliffe is sitting at a table. He’s tanned, wearing a black top with “Crumlin Boxing Club Australia” emblazoned on it in green. One of his sons opened a club like his “down under”, where he moved to work, he said. 

Nehar and Sutcliffe start teasing each other. “I know him 29 years, unfortunately,” says Nehar, of Sutcliffe. They both chuckle. 

Nehar was 17 when he joined the club in Crumlin. He was born in Iraq and arrived in Ireland on his own and sought asylum in 1996. 

He had wanted to go to the United Kingdom, but things didn't work out, he said, later. “They didn’t give me visa.”

Some children, on their own here and seeking asylum – just like Nehar back then – still come to train and seek out new beginnings at the club. Kids with all kinds of immigration backgrounds, children of immigrants and adults who’ve moved here from elsewhere, come here to connect and get fit.

Nehar now helps Sutcliffe run the club and coaches teens. He has his own business, too. After training wraps up, the two men sometimes head out to The Black Forge Inn, McGregor’s bar on Drimnagh Road, for a few drinks. 

Both Sutcliffe and McGregor, who joined the club as a kid, publicly voice anti-immigrant views.

But Sutcliffe doesn’t see a dichotomy in holding those views and breaking ground for integration for immigrant members of his club. 

Muslims aren’t integrating in Ireland, he says. But he likes Nehar, he says, who is also a Muslim. “This guy has integrated. He’s a worker, he’s an entrepreneur.”

Elsewhere, people who have cheered on the demonisation of immigrants are confronting the reality that their exception, their “but I don’t mean you”, is a bogeyman for others.

In the United States, Trump supporters have voiced anger and disbelief as the administration that they voted for disappeared their neighbours, pals, and local business workers. 

Pride and glory

Downstairs, in the stuffy windowless gym, the walls are covered in pictures of Sutcliffe and past pupils who trained up here, then went away and made him proud.

Shelves are teeming with cups, medals and other memorabilia – an ode to triumph.

There’s Sutcliffe’s green Olympic jacket, framed. There’s Sutcliffe meeting a robe-wearing Muhammad Ali. 

Here’s a young Sutcliffe in his army uniform, grinning. He served in the army for over 20 years, he says. 

Nearby, there’s a framed article about the club by the now press ombudsman, Susan McKay. 

There are also snapshots of Sutcliffe with his kids and grandkids. He has six kids, he says.

Sutcliffe points to a photo of McGregor with pride. “He was 10 years old when he came here.”

McGregor’s images are displayed everywhere on the walls. A cardboard cutout of him sits on top of an illustration of him near the ceiling, towering over the fighting ring. 

A sign at the base of the ring says: “Drugs are for mugs. Any club member found to be involved in any capacity will be expelled from the club without exception.”

McGregor has publicly admitted to taking cocaine. Sutcliffe laughs and squishes up his face when asked how he feels about that.

“He’s never taken drugs in front of me,” Sutcliffe said. “He’s a wild boy.”

McGregor was also found by a jury, in a recent civil case, to have raped a woman, Nikita Hand, in a Dublin hotel room.

Sutcliffe chooses to believe McGregor’s version of the events. That he had consensual sex with Hand, he says.  

A city pub recently banned Sutcliffe, he says, and he reckons it’s because of his relationship with McGregor. 

While McGregor talks trash about immigrants, takes drugs, and gets done for rape in court, the kids in the club – many of whom look up to him – are looking on.

Aaron Paudel, a Brown Irish teen who was warming up by punching a speed ball over and over, said he’s watched all of his fights.

We asked for workers

Nehar, the former child asylum seeker, says he doesn’t really know McGregor.

He turns up to train at the Crumlin Boxing Club some days. Takes a few photos with patrons, shakes hands and leaves, he said.

Nehar says he knows how both McGregor and Sutcliffe feel about some immigrants, though. He’s grown to understand their point of view and agrees to a degree, said Nehar. 

He said they’ve issues with immigrants who cheat social welfare and the like, and some do. 

Immigrants in Dublin have said that they feel the strain of having to be perfect just because they were born elsewhere. 

Sutcliffe is smiley and calm and doesn’t seem annoyed with thorny questions. “We’re having a conversation,” he says.

He says he thinks there have been too many immigrants who’ve come to Ireland without visas, who aren’t “vetted”, who could end up committing crimes or straining the housing supply and healthcare system.

He doesn’t have a problem with people who come to work and contribute, though, he said. 

While some immigrants have the right to work when they arrive, others are locked out of the job market, legally.

Most people move to Ireland regularly, with visas and work permits. Travelling without visas is dangerous and expensive.

The Department of Employment, which grants work permits to people who aren’t seeking asylum, issued 39,390 of them in 2024.

In the same window, about 18,560 people filed for asylum. People seeking asylum can’t legally work as soon as they arrive in Ireland.

They can only apply for a work permit if they’re still waiting in the asylum process after five months – and the wait for getting a decision on their work permit application can be lengthy, adding to the time they can’t legally work.

The Department of Justice’s fast-tracking of asylum claims from citizens of countries it considers “safe” and those filed by people from countries with the highest number of applications every three months, stops many from qualifying for the right to work every year.

This can leave people in forced idleness, frustrated, and in legally enforced poverty, scraping by on €38.80 a week. 

When told that people who come to Ireland to seek asylum are fingerprinted upon arrival, Sutcliffe said he didn’t know that.

The weight of stereotypes 

Sutcliffe points to his mobile phone, saying he’s seen online that immigrants are getting free social homes.

Immigrants, in general, are more likely to live in the private-rental sector than people born in Ireland, and are more likely to live in overcrowded conditions or be pushed into homeless shelters, says an April 2022 report by the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI).

People seeking asylum, who are just one small group of immigrants in Ireland,  aren’t eligible to join social housing lists, unless they get refugee status or some form of immigration papers. 

For any immigrants who are eligible to join social housing lists, if they do make their way to the top, and get a home, they’ll have to pay a rent linked to their income, as is usual for social housing tenants.

People seeking asylum might be given shelter through the International Protection Accommodation Service (IPAS). But there have been times when none were available, and many have been left to sleep rough.

“Of the 9,389 children in the International Protection system, 7,226 are living in emergency accommodation,” says the 2025 Child Poverty Monitor report from the non-profit Children’s Rights Alliance.

Those who do get a bed, often in cramped quarters, in an IPAS centre, often end up homeless when they’ve had a decision on their asylum claim, and so have to move out.

Leaving the asylum accommodation system was the biggest driver of homelessness for single people in the preceding six months, according to the most recent report from the Dublin Region Homeless Executive, published in May. 

Many struggle to move out of asylum shelters and move on. Some landlords are reluctant to accept former asylum seekers on Housing Assistance Payment (HAP) as tenants, for different reasons – among them, stigma.  

On top of his other gripes about immigrants, Sutcliffe also draws a link between immigration and crime. 

Old and new research has shown otherwise – such as this US study that looked for that relationship over 40 years and says, “Research has shown little support for the enduring proposition that increases in immigration are associated with increases in crime.”

But Sutcliffe points to murders or violent acts whose perpetrators weren’t born here, and blames what he sees as a rise in anti-social behaviour in Dublin city centre on single men seeking asylum.   

And what about the harms of stereotyping an entire group over the misdoings of a few? Says Sutcliffe: “How would you stereotype me?”

The out crowd

Sutcliffe says he treats everyone equally in his club, no matter where they’re from. 

But, outside, as a Dublin city councillor, his words have been divisive. 

During a meeting of Dublin City Council’s South Central Area Committee in May, Sutcliffe took issue with Sinn Féin Councillor Daithí Doolan speaking in support of Ballyfermot For All, an initiative aimed at bringing locals and newcomers closer together, helping the latter settle in. 

“Ballyfermot is for all, but for Dublin people, and Ballyfermot people, or anyone from Ireland – but anyone that’s not vetted shouldn’t be walking around Ballyfermot,” Sutcliffe said at the meeting. 

People who come to Ireland seeking asylum are participating in a legal immigration process for which they have to submit paperwork and have their fingerprints taken.

Sutcliffe pointed to his community work to add heft to his remarks at the council meeting in May.

“I’m far from racist, right?” he said. “I’m working for the community longer than Daithí Doolan, right?”  

When worlds collide 

Back in the club on Friday, Suctliffe was chatting to a few kids upstairs.

He asks Thomas Zhang if anyone was giving him flak.

Zhang said someone is bullying him, saying “racist” things. 

He said he’d told someone who used to work at the club before, but nothing changed. His face is flushed red.   

Sutcliffe gets riled up, says no one had mentioned it to him. “You come to me with that kind of stuff, okay? Would you point them out to me after?”

Zhang nods and gazes down.  

“Good boy!” says Sutcliffe. “No one gets bullied here, no one.”