'Last word on it' - Garron Noone returns to social media with telling comment

Mayo funnyman Garron Noone has returned to social media after deactivating his accounts last week. His move to leave social media came after a backlash to comments he made about immigration.

In that first video, he said: "The [immigration] systems that we have in place are being taken advantage of, and that is plain to see. And the government continually does not allow people to express their concerns about that."

Garron released a video on his TikTok and Instagram accounts. The caption of the video read: "I stand by what I said in my first video, this video will clarify any points I seen that were taken up differently to how I meant them, and this will be my last word on it."

He said: "Hello, how are you getting on? I'm back. This is the last time I'm going to discuss this particular topic. I really want to get back to doing what I like to do, which is just having the craic.

"But I needed to take a few days away. There was a lot of stuff happening online, as I'm sure many of you know, and I just couldn't stop myself looking at it and engaging with it, and it wasn't productive for me.

"I think anything I said in response to it would have been purely based on emotion and just not productive so I decided that the best thing to do was to was just to remove myself from it for a little while and clear my head.

"The first thing I want to say is just a massive thank you to everybody for their support for all the people who made such an effort to reach out to me.

READ NEXT: What did Garron Noone say about immigration before deleting social media pages amid backlash?

"I mean people were offering me to stay in their B&Bs and their homes and their hotels if I needed to carry my head. The generosity that I experienced from people is just incredible.

"What I've always known to be true is people have just such beautiful, caring souls, and I seen so much of that this week, not only from Irish people, but from people who had immigrated to the country. It was just, absolutely incredible to see.

"The second group of people I want to thank is anybody who disagreed with me in good faith.

"The last thing I want to do is paint people who disagreed with what I said, or even people who disagreed that I should have said it, the last thing I want to do is paint those people in a negative light.

"That's exactly what I was trying to say in the video is, that we should be able to have conversations about these things and I think that's tremendously valuable.

"I do want to take some accountability here. While I think that most people seemingly to me did understand what I was trying to get across in the video, I do think some of my points were too vague, and I think they were too open to interpretation.

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"It's clear to me that I definitely could have communicated better, and that is 100 per cent on me, and I absolutely should be held accountable for that.

"I have a very large platform, and the things I say get out to a lot of people, and if they're poorly communicated, people absolutely should criticise me. I think that that's absolutely tremendously important.

"Now, I'm sure a lot of you have seen the Twitter threads, the personal attacks, people calling me a racist, misinterpreting what I was saying, trying to make me out to be fascist and all the worst things that you can say about a person. Saying that I was anti-immigrant, things that are just absolutely not true at all.

"There were some attempts they made to edit my Wikipedia page to say that I was aligning myself at the far right, and that I was anti-immigrant.

"I'm sure some of you seen some of the far-right people who are misappropriating what I was saying and trying to use it to bolster their own agenda, which was obviously absolutely horrifying to me and the last thing that I would want."

"I just want to clear up some of the conspiracy theories about me, you know, being shut down by the board, or that my account was taken down.

"What happened is, while most people understood what I was saying, while most people were perfectly respectful, there was a very large backlash. It got very personal. People were trying to completely misrepresent what I was saying. I found that to be very upsetting, very hard to look at.

"I had never experienced anything on that scale before. People are negative about me all the time, I'm used to that, but to have very large groups of people misappropriating what I was saying, to have very large groups of people making out that I have some of the worst beliefs that I can possibly think of, it was difficult."

Garron then spoke about what he was trying to say in his original video.

"So, what were people misrepresenting about what I was saying? First of all, I never said that I was anti-immigration. I honestly don't know where people even got that.

"I never aligned myself with Conor McGregor and said that I agreed with everything he said or anything even close to that. In fact, I said the opposite.

"I never said that immigrants are criminals or that immigrants are making our crime rates shoot to all-time highs.

"I never said that immigrants were coming into the country and causing the crime rate to skyrocket. I never said anything about crime rates, and I never said anything about immigrants causing that or anything like that.

"What I said, is that the towns and cities are becoming much less safe, and I believe that to be true. Some people were quoting CSO statistics and saying that crime has gone down, and many types of crime have gone down. That's not the primary thing that I'm thinking about, though.

"There's a lot of anti-social behaviour being unaddressed. There's a lot of problems with drugs, the types of drugs have changed. There is many, many factors to why people feel things are getting much more unsafe, and also some of these problems were typically only present in Dublin and we are starting to see them in other places in Ireland.

"Now you can disagree with that, but it's not misinformation. There's perfectly reasonably a case to be made for that. It's something that a lot of people feel.

"The problem is, is that when we're not talking about what people are feeling, what people are saying, what people are concerned about, you allow people to hijack the conversation and drive it up into that hysterical level. But people do have legitimate concerns about things, and those concerns are fine to have," he added.

"I also feel like a lot of the time these conversations can become very centred around Dublin, and there are lots of communities outside Dublin that have concerns that are different and those things need to be respected.

"I do think that a lot of communities are just not being properly communicated with. Their voices aren't being heard and they're being told that their concerns are irrelevant. But what I'm saying and what I was saying in the video is that denying the reality that people have these concerns is leaving a massive, massive vacuum open for people like Conor McGregor to come in and occupy and spread messages that I know you don't want them to spread.

"That was the entire point of my video and I stand by that. However, I do agree, though, that when I'm saying immigration, I'm talking about safety in the same sentence, I need to be very, very specific about what I'm saying. I don't think I was specific enough, and I think that a lot of the misinterpretation about that, even though I do think most people understood what I was saying, I do think the misinterpretation is on me."

"I'm gonna go back to doing what I normally do," Garron concluded, adding that his video would be his "last word on it".

What else did Garron Noone say?

At the start of his video last week, Garron explained the reason he was posting was because he had been asked numerous times by followers for his views on the issues McGregor mentioned to Trump and the American media.

Garron also expressed reluctance to speak on the subject due to backlash he could face online.

In the video Garron said: "Now, I get asked for my opinion on these kind of serious topics all the time, I don't know why people care because I just shout at cups of tea on the internet."

He continued: "My opinion on Conor McGregor is irrelevant but I don't think he's a good person, I don't think it's particularly hard to find evidence of that.

"But it doesn't surprise me in the least to see a lot of people agreeing with what he was saying."

From there, Garron said: "There absolutely is an immigration issue in Ireland. That doesn't mean that people feel like we shouldn't take the refugees that we're able to take. It doesn't mean that people feel like people shouldn't be able to come here for better opportunities.

"The systems that we have in place are being taken advantage of, and that is plain to see. And the government continually does not allow people to express their concerns about that."

Garron also said that what is cementing the issue is that Ireland "continues to become one of the richest countries in the world while most people's quality of life is going down".

He said: "Our towns and especially our cities are becoming much less safe, now that's not just because of immigration, there's a lot of factors to that but if you can't see that that's happening then you have not left your house.

"Communities all over Ireland are concerned, and their concerns are continuously not being heard and when you continuously suppress what people are feeling, you turn them towards more extreme beliefs, you increase their distrust in the government and you push people towards racism and extremism."

He concluded: "Now, no doubt a load of people in the comments are going to completely misconstrue what I've said here but that's the internet for you."