A deeply personal review of the film Kneecap, exploring Northern Irish identity, language loss, and lingering sectarianism. A must-read for understanding the modern Northern Irish experience.
Kneecap’s music is not for me. I’m not into rap. The furthest I get into it is Jaime T. This is what I thought before I saw their film. I’ll save you reading the whole article. Go watch Kneecap. Go watch this movie. Learn Irish if you’re able. Don’t go to Duolingo.
I am a Taig. That’s a derogatory term, an anglicisation of the Irish-language male given name Tadhg. It means I’m a catholic. A Northern Irish Catholic. Naturally, I’m going to come to a film, that primarily centers on the Irish language, the treatment of Northern Irish Catholics and the politicization of the language slightly biasedly. But you know what bothered me most about this film? Not the obvious sectarianism that persists in the Police Service of Northern Ireland. Not the schismed-to-the bone Irish Nationalist paramilitaries that hate drug dealers but want drug dealers to pay them. No. What annoyed me the most about Kneecap, a film I deeply connected to, is that I cannot speak a sentence of Irish. Sure, I can tell you the numbers, I can say the Hail Mary and Our Father, I can even tell you what colour my hair is and where I’m from. But I can’t speak it. I have no place to speak it colloquially. Nowhere that I could talk haltingly in what should be my native tongue that isn’t going to be treated with strained patience or outright ridicule.
Kneecap’s story (however many elements are fictionalized) has an incredible impact and it’s not just down to Micheal Fassbender’s gravitas. The lads’ performances are phenomenal, they aren’t just rappers, nor just H, double O, D’s, they’re true performers here. The cinematography is gorgeous, from the little hand-drawn flourishes to the slightly creepy drug induced claymation scene.You don’t need me to tell you this, it won a Sundance film award after all. Slapping their naked asses baring “BRITS OUT” does not make them any less of artists, any less true Irish artists as Muldoon or Heaney or Wilde or Yeats. In the film they make it clear they don’t want our the unionist community in Northern Ireland. They mean the MI5 element, the EDL, the back channel racist thugs and paramilitaries that have tried to perpetuate the violence against immigrants in this country in recent weeks and who continue to stir fear and intimidation in this country. But Kneecap aren’t dusty old writers, defining a nations bedtime reading. To parody a phrase that’s been used by racists in past week: Irish is not just for the Irish. Kneecap does not want to police the language, they just want it in the spotlight, on the world stage. They don’t want to redefine being Irish or Catholic or both. They’re sharing their experience with these things, the language is just the medium they’re using.
I have spoken before, not here but to several artists and editors, about my disdain for the current arts scene in Northern Ireland. Among the intelligentsia and popular literature there is a movement that believes we have moved away from the petty tribal warfare of the Troubles, that this orange and green divide is no longer our main focus. There’s no one here of substance that would talk about it as a current issue in the arts. It’s the same old story. Yet it remains there, as an undercurrent in everything we say do and believe. And the lads know this. The film opens with stock footage of the Troubles, cars exploding, British soldiers, paramilitaries, and say that this is the way every story about Belfast is told. They’re right. But it’s not every story of the Troubles. It’s not every story of Belfast or us. Addressing it is not old hat, talking about it is not distasteful. Pretending this undercurrent doesn’t exist, ignoring it is why it’s allowed to fester in our society. The majority of citizens here across the board are for a peaceful Northern Ireland. True enough I believe. But there is still the minority that continue the old struggle. The problem with them is that they are at the center of the news cycle, complaining about an Irish language act or police officers celebrating a GAA victory. Language is such a problem in this country, regardless of which it is. Irish, English, Ulster Scots. It doesn’t matter what you speak there will be someone to complain about it or paint it the colour of a political party. The news in Northern Ireland (specifically the BBC News) still talks about punishment style shootings, sectarian beatings, violence on the up. They are also champions of saying that the war is over. I hear that John Lennon Christmas song play in my head every broadcast. Kneecap may stir up support for nationalism but that isn’t their end goal. Fassbender’s character is an old Provo on the run for 20 odd years. He teaches the lads Irish as children but he mythologizes it too. It is, in his hands, a political tool, a weapon against “the occupiers”. In Kneecap’s hands it is not a weapon for ideology, it isn’t a cold, unfeeling tool of academics. Kneecap, intentionally or not demilitarize and de-politicize the Irish language in this film. In their mouths it is alive and more than anything else normal.
In the film the lads note that there are 80,000 native irish speakers in Ireland, 6,000 in the north of Ireland. I am not one of them. That burns my fucking blood. They note that a country without a language is only half a culture. I feel like that being from Northern Ireland. I feel as though I’m not Irish enough. I feel like an outsider in my own country. I feel more Irish when I’m abroad than I do walking in my own town. I wish I could speak the Irish language with the same accuracy and confidence as kneecap do. I can only say a word here or there. It taps my soul when I can. Go raibh maith agat Kneecap. Thank you lads for making me feel like I have permission to try, to belong to a culture even if I am not fluent in the language, for making me feel like I don’t need anyone’s permission to be Irish, as I have felt on holidays in Dublin or Donegal or the republic.
My final thoughts? Maith thú agus go raibh maith agat. Go watch Kneecap.
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