The IRA were always soldiers until someone started shooting back. It is therefore very much in the republican tradition that Kneecap, the Northern Irish rap trio now staring down the barrel of a possible police investigation, should revel in the imagery of terrorist violence only up to the moment they face any consequences.

Kneecap last night posted a statement of apology to the families of murdered MPs Jo Cox and David Amess, after concert footage emerged in which they encouraged attendees to “kill your local MP”. Encouraging the murder of elected politicians isn’t their only offence, however. Shadow Justice Secretary Robert Jenrick took to social media last week to ask: “Why haven’t the Met investigated Kneecap under the Terrorism Act for glorifying Hamas and Hezbollah?” Last night’s statement from the group stressed: “We do not, and have never, supported Hamas or Hezbollah.” This is despite further footage of band members waving a Hezbollah flag at a gig and shouting: “Up Hamas, up Hezbollah.”

Kneecap’s sincere expression of repentance (sort of) is all well and good, but do you know which group is also proscribed in the United Kingdom? The IRA. Why, then, has it taken Kneecap endorsing a hateful group murdering people overseas to provoke this outrage, when their entire schtick involves glorifying a hateful group which planted bombs on British streets?

It’s one thing for the United States to take this line — for all the British fantasies about the “special relationship”, American politics has for over a century had a soft spot for the “cause of Ireland” and its terrorists. But for supposedly tough-talking British Conservatives to gloss over the same IRA apologism is inexplicable.

While the Kneecap statement from last night extends “our heartfelt apologies” to the Amess and Cox families, it hastens to add: “Establishment figures, desperate to silence us, have combed through hundreds of hours of footage and interviews, extracting a handful of words from months or years ago to manufacture moral hysteria.” Clearly, the group’s members are torn between a desire to avoid the legal consequences of their actions on the one hand, and the need to maintain their republican credibility — already knocked by their outrage at being denied subsidy from the British state — in the eyes of their fans.

But note that the apology, such as it is, is offered only to the relatives of Amess and Cox, and not to any of the families of those MPs whom Irish republicans murdered themselves. In the modern era there were four: Airey Neave, blown up in the parliamentary car park in 1979; Robert Bradford, gunned down outside a constituency surgery in 1981; Anthony Berry, killed in the Brighton bombing in 1984; and Ian Gow, who was killed by explosives planted outside his home in 1990.

The first of those murders was carried out by the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA), the other three by the Provisional IRA. Three were Tories, while Bradford was part of the Ulster Unionist Party, which resigned the Conservative whip in the Seventies but did not withdraw from the party organisation until 1985.

It would surely be worth asking Kneecap whether they wish to extend their apology to the living relatives of Neave, Bradford, Berry, and Gow — and for Jenrick and his colleagues to recognise that glorifying the IRA is no less a crime than Hamas or Hezbollah.

---

Henry Hill is Deputy Editor of ConservativeHome.

HCH_Hill

---