You’d think the fact that all this is happening at the same time as anti-immigration protesters are threatening to burn down hotels housing migrants really ought to give the cultural nationalists pause for thought. But then again, such an engorgement of self-regard never goes well for us. Just as we think it’s all going to work out, that we’re going to finally become the Big Men we’ve always known we are, there’s a storm off the coast that means the Spanish fleet don’t reach us, the arms can’t be landed. Or there’s a miscommunication amongst the rebels, or we start killing our own, or there’s a devastating financial crash. No doubt the next time the money dries up our new heroes, the Americans, will leap off the island as promptly as the French once did. We as a nation have always looked elsewhere for saviors destined to disappoint us in the end. And where will we be then? On the boat to England, probably.

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Is Guinness really Irish?

By Alexander Poots

Because I can’t help but suspect that, as usual, this puffing out of the national chest relates, somehow, to dem over dere, on dat udder, longer island. One way or another, it’s always to do with the English. They are the race we see ourselves in relation to, the ones we want to impress or defy. England is the omniscient Big Daddy, whose approval we Irish crave, all while telling him how much we fucking hate him and don’t care what he thinks. We are defined oppositionally: we are Irish against the English. 

The issue at hand, then, isn’t Irish people loving ourselves. That’s nothing new. It’s the smugness with which we’re doing it, as well as the ongoing issue of whom we’re really loving ourselves for. Ireland is a whole nation of in-jokes and knowing nods, which only works if there’s someone there who hasn’t heard the joke or doesn’t know what the nodding’s about — and that someone for us is, invariably, the English. 

Recently, Kneecap, Sally Rooney and Graham Linehan have all, for various reasons, acted the part of the uppity Irish rebel in the UK headlines, positing themselves as courageous truth-speakers from that more honest, more decent place across the water. Meanwhile, on every British red carpet, Paul Mescal and Andrew Scott seem to be falling over each other while laughing handsomely, suggesting with every white-toothed grin that they’re off to a party to which their English colleagues aren’t invited (probably somewhere in Stoke Newington). Musicians such as Kojaque or the aforementioned Fontaines are sending home exquisite, poignant and rageful albums from London about how much they miss Ireland, albums that contain bona fide love songs to their home nation. These are accompanied by interviews given to Irish news outlets in which they bemoan the casual racism of the English, who mock their accents and call them Paddy. But surely, with all their success, if they wanted to, they could just move back to Ireland? 

The problem is, it’s so deliciously satisfying to be stupidly offended, to feel oneself victimized. That’s one of the reasons Irish people love going over to England. We relish the romantic, stormy misery of sitting in damp flats , missing the green hills and soft, dulcet tones of our native land. We wet ourselves with glee when we find opportunities to insist that the Guinness isn’t the same over there because sea air sours it and all that painfully clichéd bollocks. We know we’re doing it, being “the Paddy”. We despise ourselves for it. Yet we can’t seem to help ourselves. We love to feel hard done by, or at least to pretend to. 

Recently, in Dublin, I attended the launch of a book about rediscovering the Irish language. I sat beside a squirming English friend as the author announced that Irish people have never been able to “authentically” express themselves in English. She talked about undoing the trauma of colonization through the rediscovery of the Irish language — specifically, through the purchasing of her book. An Irishman in short shorts, much like those sported by Paul Mescal, told us how his amazingly “authentic” girlfriend’s success grew exponentially the moment she started teaching her yoga practice in Irish instead of English. Now, at her live events, he said, she often gets over three-hundred people, all desperate to perform downward dog (madra síos, I’m guessing?) while fulfilling their primordial need to hear it said in Irish. I’m not sure I understand the appeal but then, inauthentic Mick that I am, I don’t speak fluent Irish.

To discuss the blind stupidity of these claims — to mount a defense of the “authenticity” of the English of James Joyce or Sally Rooney or Roddy Doyle or Samuel Beckett or Edna O’Brien, or Fontaines D.C. for that matter — feels vaguely self-defeating. Once you’re engaged in such a conversation, you’ve already lost. When, though, I wondered at this book launch, will we be able to talk about the particular beauty of the Irish language, without feeling the need to dismiss our use of English as inherently inauthentic? 

The stench of post-traumatic self-congratulation that is now permeating the island is, to me, sad evidence that our psyches haven’t developed beyond those of the old, wily peasant, still looking to the master we claim to despise for validation. We persist, even in our grandiose self-love, to experience it only in bitter relation to the English. And the worst part is that this belief in a perpetual and defining relationality is only true of the Irish side. It’s embarrassing to admit, but they’re not even thinking about us.

Sure, when the Irish take the piss out of the English, constantly dismissing them as bastards or pretentious or uptight or not good craic, it’s all “in jest”. Sort of. But even if it is only good-natured joshing, it’s uncomfortably regular, an ongoing undertone, and never repeated quite so freely when they’re actually in the room. 

In truth, hating the English is one of our great, unifying national pastimes. Even now, we continue to associate authority with the English, and are brought up to distrust most politicians and the police. (The only politicians we’ve ever truly loved have been our two most authoritarian Taoiseachs: Éamon DeValera and Charles Haughey, the sole potential equals to defend us against our big English Daddy). Our national identity has been formed as one of rebelliousness, of shneaky defiance. We’re delighted to be a nation of cute hoors (Hiberno-English for crafty son of a bitch). Growing up in Nineties Ireland, I can honestly say, hand on heart, that until I came across English people as an adult, I had never met anyone — anyone — who didn’t believe that getting around the law (be it by speeding or drink driving, a little bit of stealing or even just getting away with not paying a fine), was a satisfying victory against The Man. The Man being, not the Irish state, as, in fact, it was, but the lingering presence of those bastard fucking English. 

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The rising violence of Irish rebellion

By Aris Roussinos

This could all be said to be fairly benign. Yet is it really a coincidence that Ireland’s moment of swelling national pride is happening at the same time as our first significant anti-immigration protests? The recent violence in Citywest only further proves that time has not stemmed the festering tide of Irish nationalism. Also, can it really be said that Ireland’s immediate alignment with Palestine — and the persistent parallels drawn with our own historical relationship with England — isn’t fomenting bad feeling, not only towards Israelis (and, if we’re being honest, Jews more generally), but also towards our old foes, the English? Our close alignment with Palestine is, after all, based on the idea that they, like ourselves, are the victims of brutal neighbors, attempting to subsume their country and eradicate their race. Again, Catherine Connolly, a woman who may soon become the Irish president, has drawn this comparison directly, and has even gone so far as to state that Hamas should have a part in the future of Palestine’s governance rather than suffering the indignity of international intervention. In other words, fuck off away from our Republic, England. Just leave us, and them, to it, whatever the consequences.

Perhaps it is the ultimate indifference of the English towards Ireland, the Irish, and our shared history, that makes our current sport of flouncing about, utterly delighted with ourselves, appear so worryingly pathetic. I know that the surge of rageful pleasure I feel when we beat the English in rugby (or at anything else for that matter) has to be, at this point in our shared history, suspect. Similarly, to sit in the audience of the book launch of an Irish language textbook on a September night in 2025, and hear the two people on stage discussing the lasting effects of a famine that happened in the 1840s, is indicative of a nation whose pride is still dependent on a sense of having been wronged. This love of Ireland, as we are currently expressing it, is too closely tied in with our ongoing hatred of England, the English, and everything we can’t bear to forget they’ve done to us. All while they’re over there, not thinking about us at all. 

When, I wonder, will we start loving Ireland, not as a hurt, ever-limping post-colonial nation, but as the rich, capable and, for many, almost indecently comfortable country that it now is? One with an enormous capacity for innovative literature, art, film, music, philosophy and political development, uncolored by our history with England, or what the English might be thinking. When, too, will our progress, internally and internationally, no longer be measured against this perpetual overcoming of our past, but rather by our present and future? Even our politicians, those pink-nosed white men in ill-fitting suits, seem to only be playing at running the country. When are the Irish people within the Republic, those of us with no justifiable cause for complaint beyond their laddish ineptitude, going to start looking inwards, at our own very real national problems and our own, very real, responsibilities? We need to learn to take pride in, and accountability for, our island, without first making sure the English are watching, then spitting in their bastard watching eyes, just to make it feel sufficiently “authentic”. 

The official name of the six British-owned counties in Ulster is “Northern Ireland”, but Irish republicans like Kneecap wouldn’t call it that because they don’t see why part of the country should have a name other than just “Ireland”. They might be slightly happier with the North of Ireland, or the Six Counties, or (as the novelist Flann O’Brien suggested) “the sick counties”. The group aren’t interested in post-colonialism, as so many students in Britain are, because they don’t believe that the term applies to their own situation. Northern Ireland is the fag-end of British colonialism, not a condition which comes after it. And though the Northern Irish middle classes now speak like almost everyone else of diversity and democracy, it’s still a sectarian state, one gerrymandered into existence a century ago to ensure that Protestants remained permanently in power.

Kneecap speak Irish and use the Irish form of their names. They would have attended Catholic schools in West Belfast where the Irish language is taught, just as it’s taught in most schools in the Irish Republic. The difference is that a lot of children in the Republic feel no more enthusiasm for learning the native language than many British children do for learning French or Latin, and a lot of them speak it as poorly as the British do French. It is, however, the official language of the nation: like other things in Ireland a polite fiction.

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In defence of stereotypes

By Terry Eagleton

There are, for example, two versions of the Irish constitution, one in Irish and the other in English, both of which state that in the event of a conflict of interpretation between them, the Irish version will be deemed to take priority. But the Irish version is widely believed to be a translation from the English version, meaning a copy assumes precedence over an original. Like other colonial peoples, the Irish were plagued by the sense that they were copies, mimic men, parodies of their metropolitan proprietors. It’s said that the Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh, on hearing that a wealthy American had arrived in Dublin to buy up original poetic manuscripts, took to writing the original drafts of his own work, complete with queries, deletions, hasty last-minute additions and the like.

Learning Irish in Belfast, however, is a more meaningful affair because it’s bound up with your political identity, and the language has grown there more rapidly than anywhere else on the island. The Falls Road in nationalist Belfast is full of advertisements for Irish-language classes, fraternal trips to Celtic Brittany, lectures on renowned Irish women and so on. Like war, culture is the continuation of politics by other means. Gerry Adams doesn’t speak Irish well, but it would be unthinkable for him not to speak it at all. Irish is also the everyday language of the so-called “Gaeltachtaí” or Irish-speaking areas in the Republic, where motorists can easily find themselves lost without trace because there are no English names on the road signs.

The Gaeltachtaí, which comprise only about 1% of the Irish population, are the fruit of the Gaelic League of the early 20th century, which revived a language on the point of extinction. Branded as uncouth and inferior, in steep decline because of its association with poverty and backwardness, it was the daily speech of most of those millions who either died in the Great Famine or were driven into exile by it, so that the death or departure of the Irish was coupled with the threatened demise of their native tongue. It was the nationalist intelligentsia who tried to retrieve the indigenous culture, and who were, on the whole, remarkably successful in doing so. Today in Ireland there are academically outstanding schools which teach everything through Irish, as well as writers who write only in Irish and families who speak only Irish at home, so that the children grow up bilingual. Newcomers to the country discover after a while that phrases like “ya fuggin’ gobshoite” aren’t actually Irish at all.

Kneecap must strike some English people as a curious throw-back. Didn’t all that nationalist militancy die with the Anglo-Irish Agreement? But the group is a reminder that nothing could be further from the truth. The guns may have, for the most part, fallen silent, but some traffic roundabouts (and occasionally some people) are painted red, white and blue, and there are pubs a Protestant wouldn’t drink in. Nowhere in Europe, for both good and ill, is there a more tangible refutation of the claim that ordinary people aren’t interested in politics. It’s true that many of the younger generation find politics a turn-off, but there are also those like Kneecap who are passionate about it, and the reason for this is that nationalism is a form of identity politics. It’s in this context of identity politics — of, say, gay rights or the women’s movement — that the group should be seen. Far from being archaic, they are the latest thing. From the Seventies onwards, revolution may have gradually given way to questions of identity, but nationalism can encompass both. This, no doubt, is why it has proved by far the most powerful form of radicalism in the modern age, starting with the partial independence of Ireland in 1921, and going on to dismantle one colonial state after another.

Kneecap are alleged to have shown support for Hamas and Hezbollah, an accusation they claim takes their words out of context. They might argue that making such statements are an attempt to outrage their audiences, and aren’t to be taken seriously. But many in Kneecap’s audiences would find little to outrage them on this score, and in any case the complaint that your words have been taken out of context has become the dreariest of clichés, as in “When I called you a contemptible little shit, my words were taken out of context”. More to the point, what context could they have possibly been taken out of? Perhaps you were quoting or joshing or pretending or just blind drunk, but it isn’t likely.

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Will Kneecap sell out?

By Darren McGarvey

The fact is that revolutionary nationalists, unlike Right-wing nationalists like Trump or Modi, tend to be internationalist in outlook. Nationalism is seen often enough as an inward-looking, chauvinistic affair, but some Irish nationalists in the early 20th century were keenly interested in anti-colonial struggles in India, Egypt, South Africa, Afghanistan and elsewhere, and were quite the reverse of provincial. One of them, Frederick Ryan, who crops up briefly in James Joyce’s Ulysses, edited an English-language anti-colonialist newspaper in Cairo.

It’s this history which lies behind Kneecap’s shouts of solidarity with anti-colonial movements elsewhere in the world, though it’s to be hoped that they don’t support the Hamas atrocities of October 7. Their opposition to Israel’s massacre in Gaza, however, is entirely understandable. These young men, too, belong to an ethnic group, the Gaelic Irish in the North, which has been hassled and humiliated over the years, treated as second-class citizens and as captives in their own country. The architect of South African apartheid, Hendrik Verwoerd, once expressed his admiration for the set-up. Their parents and grandparents will have encountered social prejudice, discrimination and perhaps even torture and death. Kneecap don’t, like some of their generation in Northern Ireland, dismiss all this as ancient history and turn instead to Taylor Swift.

It is, of course, possible to make a fetish out of history, as one can make a fetish out of territorial unity. Republicans call for a united Ireland, but unity isn’t a good in itself. If justice would somehow be served by carving England down the middle, it would be a plan well worth considering. But division is objectionable when it happens in the name of oppression, and the partition of Ireland, one of the most brazen political stitch-ups of the last century, is exemplary of this. A large group of people were deprived of their right to political self-determination in order to preserve the privileges of another group of people who were doing well out of colonial rule.

As I write, Kneecap is still taking heat because of some deeply offensive remarks about both Hamas and Conservative MPs. For this, they should clearly be brought to book. And yet Irish republicans are no strangers to hostility from across the water, where the image of the Irish has been either one of lovable rogues or disgusting barbarians. Since we’ve had the former in the shape of The Pogues, it’s no doubt time for the latter.

Yet if the demands for accountability are only growing shriller, Kneecap’s story is nothing new. Once an artist moves from cult status into the mainstream, all while continuing to challenge accepted narratives, a reaction is sure to follow. Amid the apologies and the caveats, then, Kneecap now faces the same question as any radical artist on the precipice of stardom. Do you soften your edges for access, or hold your ground, and risk the establishment’s wrath?

In many ways, Kneecap’s difficulties feel specific to our cultural moment. The band has been accused of glorifying violence, of supporting Hamas and Hezbollah. These are charges they’ve denied. Either way, it comes as no surprise to me that this pro-Palestine, anti-government trio are in a bind. As a professional working in various capacities as a writer and performer, I can tell you right now that using your platform to either criticize Israel, or express solidarity with innocent Palestinians, comes with risks.

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Kneecap are the future of Northern Ireland

By Darran Anderson

I’ve been reported to the police for taking part in fundraisers for medics in the Gaza Strip. I’ve been accosted by a chief executive, and delegates at a conference, for using a keynote speech to urge a politically neutral organization to join calls for a ceasefire. Scheduled appearances were mysteriously canceled, and organizers have had to bulk up security in case protesters turn up.

The tensions Kneecap speak to arise not just from the strength of feeling around the war between Israel and Hamas, but the strong sense many of us have that our political class collaborates with major media players to stifle debate. It creates a culture whereby any criticism to the prevailing narrative — that anything Israel does is morally justified — becomes futile and where raising your voice against the systematic brutalization of innocent civilians in the Gaza Strip starts to feel dangerous.

In this context, then, Kneecap become a case study in how thought and speech are regimented — and, in the generalities anyway, it’s nothing new. Transgressive artists have long been made examples of and punished for their politics. Sinead O’Connor’s career was derailed after she tore up a photo of the Pope on Saturday Night Live, in protest of the Catholic Church’s abuse cover-ups. She was right, but she was ruined. The Dixie Chicks were boycotted, threatened and driven off country radio after criticizing the Iraq War. NWA had the FBI on their backs.

And so the list goes on. In every case, craven politicians join a growing media chorus of condemnation, rendering the acts in question too toxic to book. It’s the same story with Kneecap, with the very journalists who defend edgy comedians like Jimmy Carr and Ricky Gervais — and their right to say incredibly offensive things we all know are part of an act — now expecting us to believe Kneecap are some kind of quasi-paramilitary group.

Beyond the media outrage, meanwhile, Kneecap’s predicament ironically speaks to the band’s success and their clear desire to cross into the mainstream. That’s why we’ve seen statements issued and apologies offered — public relations maneuvers aimed at minimizing the commercial impact of negative coverage. Though the group certainly wish to retain their radical credentials, it’s also clear they’ve been pushed into a far more defensive position than they’re comfortable with, or indeed than their fans are used to.

For example, while the band has emphasized that it stands in solidarity with Palestinian civilians, and oppose Israel’s bombardment and occupation, they do not support militant Islamist organizations. Yet, such distinctions rarely matter once the wheels of the media outrage machine begin turning. The point is not to understand or debate Kneecap’s actual views, but to frame them as toxic enough that venues, festivals and collaborators all feel pressured to abandon them.

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Labour's ruthless raid on the sick

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And though I loathe the confected outrage of many a blowhard on this issue, the wicked dilemma Kneecap now faces is arguably one of their own making. They’ve sold themselves as countercultural and gained a loyal global following as a result. This boxes them into a specific set of responses — none of them free of risk. By being seen to back down, even slightly, in the face of a concerted political and media effort to paint them as terrorist sympathizers, they risk alienating their core support, thus weakening the very leverage they have in the music industry. Alternatively, doubling down will effectively mean being blacklisted from major festivals and media outlets for the foreseeable future, even if they do at least retain their integrity and links to the fanbase.

Despite the calm collectedness the band and their manager are keen to paint, then, there’ll now be panic behind the scenes. And no wonder: life-changing opportunities are now on the line. Of course, for the group’s hardcore fanbase, the answer is simple: fight the power. But it’s never quite as simple as “stand your ground” versus “sell out”.

As creatives, we hope to have our cakes and eat them too. We want the visibility, the critical acclaim, and the big performance fees. But we also want to be seen as unwavering in our principles, and unscrupulous in pursuit of artistic integrity. Once a radical act begins to gain traction beyond pub open-mics — when a wider audience starts paying attention — everything changes. The decisions get heavier. The risks get real. And that visibility, often romanticized from the outside, can be extremely stressful. A lot of radical artists don’t plan for this moment. It comes as a shock. They’re propelled into a space they never expected to inhabit, and they arrive carrying principles that don’t always map neatly onto the pressures and expectations that follow.

Suddenly, the stakes aren’t just ideological. As Kneecap is doubtless now discovering, livelihoods are involved: your own, your partner’s, your kids’. You’ve got a label to deal with. You’ve got tour managers, stage crew, new fans, and media people around you, many of whom have very different values and priorities. The freedom to just steamroll your way through, to say “to hell with it all”— that becomes much harder to exercise when other people depend on your success to pay their bills. And despite their rebellious aesthetics, bands like Kneecap are professionals with aspirations of their own, not least a desire to be financially secure.

And, especially for a group from West Belfast, when someone from your community finally breaks through, there’s often a silent burden to carry: represent us, but don’t get it wrong or you’ll have hell to pay. Kneecap didn’t ask to be role models or political lightning rods. They came up from a place where art, humor, trauma, and resistance blur together. West Belfast isn’t a backdrop: it’s the very soil they grew out of. Their use of the Irish language isn’t decorative, it’s an act of cultural reclamation, an assertion of identity in a postcolonial context that still cuts deep. Their solidarity with Palestine comes from that same instinct: to back those being brutalized by a far more powerful force.

Ultimately, then, Kneecap will have to decide what matters more: global recognition in a fickle, spineless industry, or holding true to their principles. If you want to be mainstream, you have to make sacrifices, and few acts can have it both ways. Even Eminem went pop eventually. Unrelenting scrutiny comes with any public platform. Kneecap exercises their freedom of speech to say what they believe, but there are always consequences to raising your head above the parapet. Other people will exercise theirs to condemn, marginalize and punish. That’s the way free speech works.

Artists won’t always get it right, and when they do fuck up, it’s appropriate that they should acknowledge their mistakes. Integrity comes not just from staying true to our beliefs, but also from admitting when we’ve crossed a line. We’ve all said and done stupid and offensive things. In the end, though, that’s not the issue. The issue is that, as a result of expressing views about Israel regarded as controversial — but which are in fact entirely mainstream — Kneecap now has every editor in the country instructing hacks to trawl through every lyric, every interview and every act of public flatulence, looking for proof these guys are something they aren’t.

Who knows what Kneecap will do next. I don’t envy their plight. But I do know this: the system rewards outrage only when it can be commodified. It tolerates rebellion as long as it’s aesthetic. The moment your politics cut too close to the bone, you’ll find out just how tolerant the liberal cultural sphere really is, and who your friends really are.

In the opening seconds of Kneecap’s new film, the old cliches we all carry about Northern Ireland are swiftly dispensed. Car bombs, graffiti on gable walls, checkpoints, border signs, Molotov cocktails, barely pubescent British army cannon fodder, hoovered up from Brixton to the Gorbals, kneeling with their rifles on street corners while ragged kids gather round them. If they were following the prevailing models of film in the North of Ireland, as they put it, the movie would be more dewy-eyed trauma porn. People don’t live like that though, not all the time, and even when they are forced to, innate resistances begin.

Kneecap is an inventive, picaresque, often hilarious, fictionalised origin story of the Irish hip-hop trio. It’s defiant in subject and form, rejecting the kitchen-sink misery or Stage Oirish paddywhackery usually demanded of the Irish, while simultaneously flirting with and subverting these modes. The irreverence itself is political, given Northern Ireland was a place where false piety was weaponised by every side to damn the other and whitewash themselves. But the band, and film, embrace the farcical nature of the post-Troubles North with a playful defiance. When the Belfast writer Louis MacNeice wrote of “being various”, it didn’t just mean virtuous things. It is our best and worst sides, and this film shows them, taking place in a contemporary world of dead-end jobs, k-holes and breakbeats rather than newsreels from the Seventies and Eighties.

They go for all the sacred cows of Norn Iron — the PSNI and the British State, philistine Unionists, Republicans who abandon their familial responsibilities and switch to new-age beliefs, anti-drug vigilantes who end up with drug dealers working for them, all the petty lords of their particular fiefdoms. Even tedious Gaelic teachers come in for a bruising, particularly as there’s no excuse for making such a mercurial language boring (“May the lowest stone in the sea be on top of your head” is one memorable line in a film bursting with them). Full of healthy self-ridicule, the irreverence is radical because reverence, as Northern Ireland has shown, is the first step on the road to solipsism, corruption, essentialism and eventually hell.

More than anything, Kneecap the film and the band are concerned with the present, which has long been squandered in the North of Ireland. People chose or were forced to live anywhere but the present. Republicans, for example, were obsessed with the future. Their favourite slogan was/is Tiocfaidh ár lá meaning “Our day will come”. After the Brighton bomb killed five people, the IRA released a statement: “Today we were unlucky, but remember we only have to be lucky once — you will have to be lucky always.” There was always a suitably opaque sense of the utopia of a future United Ireland, which untested could become any fantasy the imagination could conjure, rather than what it would and will be — the end of one set of colonial troubles and, after the inevitable sesh, the beginning of a new self-inflicted set of troubles.

Meanwhile, both sides of the divide remain obsessed with the past — King Billy, the Hunger Strikers, the Apprentice Boys, the Easter Rebels… One side trapped and deluded in triumphalism, the other in martyrdom and magical thinking. Catholics could console themselves that the future belonged to them via demographic replacement, something Unionists such as Paisley (“they breed like rabbits and multiply like vermin”) obsessed over. On the other side, Loyalist siege mentality gave way to paranoia and a zero-sum game, whereby a job or house for “one of them” is “one less for us”. This mentality has fuelled a race to the bottom, with the main difference in their deprived neighbourhoods being the colour of the kerbstones and bunting. It is this betrayal of the present, the neurosis of trying to exist in the past and future, that Kneecap reject with a film and discography that are manifestly about the only place we ever inhabit — the now.

What is the present that Kneecap and their generation face in Northern Ireland? Back home this month, I found mixed signals. There’s lots of talk of (parts of) Belfast buzzing with young professionals drinking London-priced drinks and the inflated cost of property. Beyond this bubble, things are different. Poverty and disaffection flourish in inverse proportion to opportunity. Escape comes mostly in the form of criminality, drink, hard drug use and abuse. Communities are beset by paramilitaries turned gangsters and the police are mistrusted by both sides. Minimum wage jobs and food banks are standard. In many places, someone who’d be an entrepreneur somewhere else, somewhere more functional, ends up a dealer. The communities are still largely segregated, beginning at primary school.

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My day with the Belfast rioters

By Alexander Poots

All along the north coast, there are endless paramilitary flags, a tent revival, a drive-in gospel service, even a fence upon which a man was crucified by loyalist paramilitaries a few months ago. There are few signs of any post-Troubles Enlightenment and, in working-class areas where I grew up, few signs of there being a post-Troubles. Even the great symbol of Belfast, the Samson and Goliath shipyard cranes, is one of post-industrial decline. It’s certainly better to live in farce rather than tragedy, and the Peace Process was hard-earned and vital, however flawed, but worryingly it feels like suspended animation. The idea that tourism and investment would save us was always suspect because it’s not capitalism’s primary purpose to do so. The idea that integration, economic justice and eventually real peace could occur is hamstrung by the many politicians and religious figures who benefit from division, paralysis and bad faith.

No wonder, there is such an anarchic element to the likes of Kneecap. Who could blame them for wanting more? “A free Ireland,” one of Kneecap’s heroes, James Connolly, claimed, “will control its own destiny from the plough to the stars.” By contrast, the least one could hope for is some agency over their own life.

It takes a movie this intentionally juvenile to signal a newfound maturity in Northern Irish film. Kneecap takes the tropes and ciphers and turns them inside out, it deflects the gaze back at itself. Cheap moralism and sentimentality are dispensed with, in favour of something more reflexive. There’s little doubt where the trio’s allegiances lie, with the “Northern” scored out on signs of “Northern Ireland”.

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Is anyone at home in Northern Ireland?

By Aris Roussinos

Yet the fact that they are scathing about so many things, in an impish way, the fact that they arouse the ire of so many — including the UK government, the DUP, the UUP and even the mild-mannered Alliance Party — is a sign they are treading where the sanctimonious rarely dare. And their attitude of “show, don’t tell” is remarkably effective, as exemplified by their use of the Irish language. With an indigenous language vanishing at a pace of almost two a month, there’s the temptation to give in to sanctimony and lecture the world about “To hell or Connacht”, hedge schools, the Famine and the real reason so many people speak English around the world. Kneecap choose instead to help Irish survive by simply allowing it to breathe or, as they put it, letting the dodo out of the glass. The film is also a testament to working-class DIY culture, which because of the state of mainstream culture here, now a playground for the vacuous progeny of the rich, may be our only source of hope.

There are those who have taken umbrage with the band. The trio has been condemned by politicians and the media, many of whom have profited from how dysfunctional the North has been while denouncing those who dare to speak the truth. If Kneecap represent disorder, indecency, abnormality, it might be worth considering what order, decency and normality have looked like for the hundred years of Northern Ireland’s existence. Rejecting the archetypes one by one, refusing to migrate to survive, insisting on creating something organically from the ground up themselves, Kneecap have found a path where they were told there was none. They have made their own hope and it’s a raucous but exciting thing. They convincingly demonstrate that laughter is never a singular thing. It can mean and contain multitudes — joy, mockery, self-deprecation, relief, even the crazed elation of having nothing to lose.