Take these yokes

An Anglo-American audience is a mixed blessing for an Irish artist. Pro: you get their money. Con: their opinions, too.

The Irish hip-hop trio Kneecap have exploded in popularity since last year’s film about them. They now have less time for Irish-language poetry events in Dublin. They have also attracted international controversy, which they say is a bad-faith reaction to the pro-Palestinian solidarity they have been expressing in Ireland for years without a problem.

In the UK in May this year, Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh – stage name ‘Mo Chara’ – was charged with displaying a Hizbullah flag while saying ‘up Hamas, up Hizbullah’ at a gig in November 2023. Following a hearing last month at Westminster Magistrates’ Court, he was released on unconditional bail to appear before a judge again in August, with a defence team that includes the barrister who helped free the Birmingham Six.

The Metropolitan Police have dropped an investigation into another alleged chant at a gig in 2023 (‘The only good Tory is a dead Tory. Kill your local MP’), the statutory time limit for prosecution having expired. The band have distanced themselves from the accusations, said they do not wish to incite violence, and pointed out that the dated footage ‘wasn’t an issue until we said “Free Palestine” at Coachella’. They say the current media circus is a ‘carnival of distraction’ from the genocide in Gaza.

There were widespread calls, including from Keir Starmer, to ban Kneecap from playing at Glastonbury this year, but the festival organisers stood by the band and they performed. Their set and Bob Vylan’s are now under further police investigation – two data points in what begins to look like a suppressive pattern, given the UK government’s simultaneous move to proscribe Palestine Action as a terrorist group for spray-painting aeroplanes. Although the BBC had decided not to air Kneecap’s performance at Glastonbury, a fan’s livestream from the crowd got more than 1.8 million likes on TikTok.

In Ireland, ‘Stop the genocide’ is an uncontroversial statement for any mainstream politician; in most of the Anglosphere, it’s career-endangering. But Kneecap have faced smaller-scale opposition at home. When their first single, ‘C.E.A.R.T.A.’, was broadcast on the Irish-language station Raidió na Gaeltachta in 2017, RTÉ pulled it after complaints about its references to drug use. And Kneecap have been an obvious target for the dismayingly numerous people still hostile to the Irish language.

One such figure, the former Democratic Unionist Party leader Arlene Foster, looms large in the band’s lyrics. ‘I live rent-free in Kneecap’s heads,’ she claimed. (This eager demonstration of her internet savviness opened her up to the rejoinder that the British Empire has lived rent-free in Ireland for hundreds of years.) She appears in the opening lines of their 2019 single ‘H.O.O.D.’: ‘Who’s the most violent person you know except Arlene?’

With more English than their earlier work, the song still uses a fair amount of Irish. Specific Ulster usages – ‘barraíocht’, ‘foighde’, ‘achan’ – tether the language to a Northern Irish context where its advocates must fight harder than in the Republic. ‘If you feed a crocodile it will keep coming back for more,’ Foster said of Sinn Féin’s demands for an Irish Language Act. She later clarified that she had nothing against the language, but was simply against it having ‘equity and equality’ with English.

Many of their international fans, before listening to Kneecap, hadn’t realised that the Irish language exists at all – and that far from a dialect of English, it has roughly the same lexical distance from it as Russian. Dá mbeadh canúint Bhéarla i gceist, d'fhéadfá an abairt seo a thuiscint. If Irish were a dialect of English, you’d be able to understand this sentence – and if you needed that translation, there’s the proof. Kneecap’s lyrics provide plenty more evidence for the independence and vitality of Irish. Many public figures pay lip service to the language, but Kneecap’s allegiance to it is deeply felt and lived: DJ Próvaí was an Irish teacher, while Mo Chara and Móglaí Bap went to Belfast’s only Irish-medium secondary school.

‘C.E.A.R.T.A.’ is laced with in-jokes. Scaled down for a minority language, a rapper’s bombastic lifestyle involves holidaying in the small Donegal Gaeltacht town of Falcarragh and doing coke with the stars of TG4, the Irish-language station that attracts 3.73 million viewers a year – around the same number EastEnders gets per episode. ‘Mo Money Mo Problems’ this is not.

TG4’s viewership is still an impressive testament to the power of subtitles, considering that it’s many times higher than the total number of fluent Irish-speakers. The self-reported data from the most recent censuses in Ireland and the UK suggest that there are around 110,000 people who speak Irish daily outside the education system. In the Irish census, 1.9 million said they spoke Irish but only 10 per cent of them said they spoke it ‘very well’. According to the American Community Survey 2017-21, there were 16,550 people who spoke Irish at home, including 2358 who spoke English ‘less than “very well”’. Most of them are presumably children who have yet to start school, but it isn’t impossible that some are elderly emigrants from the Gaeltacht. The oral storyteller Séan Ó hEinirí, born in 1915, required a translator for questions posed to him by the BBC. Some of the following generation’s Gaeltacht emigrants may well have gone to America with shaky English and never fully refined it.

There are still young people more comfortable in Irish than in English, but few who couldn’t live their whole life through English if they needed to. Even then, there’s often a splitting of domains: I have friends who speak mostly Irish with in their social or family lives but whose academic or technical English is stronger – there isn’t much you can study in Irish beyond secondary school besides the language itself.

Ireland sometimes has an almost fetishistic relationship with its so-called national language. Anglophones make the bestseller lists with sentimental – and often enough butchered – English-language discussions of their favourite Irish words, while books written in Irish by native speakers are rarely stocked outside specialist shops.

Kneecap’s lyrics illustrate the reality that this cloying approach to the language would have us forget: in the Gaeltacht and for tens of thousands elsewhere in the country, Irish is not a museum piece but a normal means of daily communication. DJ Próvai in the film compares the language to ‘an Dódó deireanach’, the last Dodo, stuck behind glass in a zoo and longing to be free so it can live. It’s a joke, but the thrust of the argument is real. Native speakers never needed to be shown that Irish is a living language. But for the English-speaking majority, Kneecap have made many not only admire Irish but actually want to use it. The number of boys taking A-Level Irish in Northern Ireland nearly doubled last year.

This progress has been met with a corresponding backlash, especially in the North. Kneecap’s 2019 single ‘Get Your Brits Out’ characterises the Ulster Unionist attitude to Irish as: ‘Go back to Dublin if you want to rap.’ The lyrics invite such begrudgers to ‘Just take these yokes and we’ll go for a dance.’ What follows is a bilingual quickstep in which the languages are mixed for sound and rhythm as much as semantics. Often enough the Irish phrases themselves are mundane; rather than preserving the language in amber, Kneecap slip in functional words that happen to suit the lyrics. The mix of languages in ‘Nois cúpla ceist, do you want it in your chest’ is there for rhyme; in ‘Isteach san offie, he’s looking some tins, man,’ for metre. The goal of this Anglo-Irish linguistic party is not to resolve a historical battle so much as to show both languages a good time.