“Guess who’s back on the news, it’s your favourite Republican hoods,” spits Móglaí Bap on Kneecap’s 2019 track, Get Your Brits Out – a roiling, riotous tune, rapped in both English and Irish, in which the trio imagine a drug-fuelled night out with DUP politicians.
“Favourite Republican hoods” is a cheeky yet apt descriptor for how the provocative, satirical Irish-language rap group have been received this year. Kneecap became the surprise stars of Sundance film festival, where their biopic – a semi-fictional origin story in which they play themselves opposite Michael Fassbender – received rave reviews and the festival’s audience award last month. The film has been praised for its anarchic, irreverent tone, grappling with issues of identity and the tumultuous social and political landscape of Northern Ireland, post-Good Friday agreement.
But the group isn’t likely to feature on Kemi Badenoch’s Spotify Wrapped. The British government soured Kneecap’s recent success by blocking the group from receiving a £15,000 grant. Their application to the Music Export Growth Scheme – an independent, government-backed arts initiative that offers grants to promote artists overseas – had been approved, before the government stepped in to rescind the funding. A spokesperson for the UK business secretary said they did not want to give taxpayers’ money “to people that oppose the United Kingdom itself”. Which raises the question: does art have to be pro-union to be recognised and properly funded?
The intervention sets a troubling precedent for creative, political expression. In the era of arcane streaming models, where artists can be paid as little as 13% of the income made from streams, musicians are all the more reliant on independent grants and funding. It seems a flagrant attempt to defang subversive art: Kneecap’s themes directly confront the Tory government’s failings and the stifling post-Troubles landscape it has manufactured.
I saw the group – made up of Móglaí Bap, Mo Chara and DJ Próvaí – at their Belfast homecoming show in December, at the hallowed Ulster Hall. This was a venue once considered the bastion of Ulster unionism and a pulpit for Ian Paisley. The irony of taking over a stage that was once used to preach hate and division was not lost on them.
“We’re working-class first, and there’s a bigger enemy out there,” Móglaí Bap shouted on stage. “God bless the Good Friday agreement. They want us divided.”
Kneecap’s brand of Republican politics is honest and alive – and rage-inducing for rightwingers. The group have courted plenty of controversy as a result. They regularly discuss Britain’s need to confront its colonial past in interviews, led a “Brits out” chant at a pub Prince William and Kate had previously visited and unveiled a mural of a burning police Land Rover in Belfast. However unfair, Badenoch’s decision to starve the group of funding is in some ways unsurprising. For Kneecap, the move is just another expression of the British government’s colonial mindset.
When I met them at a later date in Belfast, our conversation was expansive, funny and optimistic. We discussed their hopes for a non-exclusionary, multicultural united Ireland, and their focus on class solidarity as a means to overcome sectarianism in Northern Ireland. We talked about how more people have taken their own lives in the north since the Good Friday agreement than were killed in political violence throughout the Troubles, and how the band see the Irish language not as a weapon – but as a creative mode, a way of survival, a way to converse with friends and live their lives authentically.
Kneecap are part of the “ceasefire generation”, born at the tail end of the Troubles and with the Good Friday agreement and its promise of peace ringing in their ears. This is a youth contending with a living, amorphous conversation about its identity and political future. The British government’s attempt to stem that is draconian and dangerous. It also seems to directly contravene the Good Friday agreement, which enshrined protections for diverging political aspirations – the tongue-in-cheek Get Your Brits Out and otherwise. The result of this insidious form of censorship? Potentially, the proliferation of state-sanctioned art, which would not only blunt the intentions of the Good Friday agreement, but suppress a generation expressing their full political identity.
It is a charged time in Northern Ireland, with change afoot. Figures for national and faith identities have shifted massively. The last census figures showed that, for the first time, there are more people from a Catholic background in the country than Protestant, while 29% identified as Irish-only. The Irish language was only officially recognised by the British government in 2022, and later this year, the first Irish language primary school will open in east Belfast – a generally loyalist area. Michelle O’Neill has become the first ever Republican first minister.
It is natural that with these changes will come artists who will, in their own way, give voice to these currents – however controversial their art may appear to fusty rightwingers. Kneecap have rallied a legal team together to challenge the decision. Here is hoping they win. Fine art – well-funded art – is worthy whether on a museum podium or spat through a balaclava.
Anna Cafolla is a Belfast-born, London-based writer and editor with a focus on youth culture
