It is hard not to feel a degree of sympathy for Kneecap, after one of the Irish hip hop trio was yesterday charged with a terrorism offence for allegedly waving a Hezbollah flag at a gig. One of the more striking things about Northern Ireland is the sense that British law is, to a large degree, optional, or at least only sporadically enforced, and there are few more obvious examples than the overt support for terrorism which is completely normalised in the country.

Walking my children to school, for example, I stroll past a couple of IRA memorials, graffiti marking the area as an Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) zone of interest, and other scribblings supporting an alphabet soup of dissident Republican groups. All of these are technically illegal — though, in practice, some more so than others. On the way to my local hardware shop, I enter a zone marked by Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) flags and Ulster Defence Association (UDA) murals. Visiting friends in East Belfast’s Newtownards Road presents an odd and initially disorientating juxtaposition of hipster microbreweries and coffee shops with memorials marking the territory of various Loyalist paramilitary battalions, all illegal and all tolerated. As one Twitter wag put it, regarding Kneecap’s entanglement with the British state, “[I] Can’t wait for them to arrest all the lampposts in Belfast.”

Such is the nature of Northern Ireland: the British state’s hold on the province is so tenuous that proscribed terrorist groups such as the UVF can openly parade without police interference. Indeed, when the state is under pressure, as happened during last summer’s riots, the police and Stormont government can directly appeal to proscribed groups to restore order. With their own NGO-like access to government, allowing them to plead their case for regeneration funding, proscribed terrorist groups effectively function as an intermediary between the British state and working-class communities.

When the law is applied, as with this Easter’s arrest of Shankill bomber Sean Kelly for wearing an IRA jacket at a Republican parade, the complaint made is not that the law is enforced but that it is enforced unevenly: why is it a crime when we do this, but not when they do that? The entire thing, like much in Northern Ireland, at first strikes the mainland visitor as absurd, until he acclimatises to the country’s warped internal logic.

The irony for Kneecap — essentially a Republican-themed pop group whose actual politics are merely mainland British Corbynism — is that having made a career protesting against British rule in Ireland, they have now fallen afoul of British law as it is more rigorously applied in Britain itself. The logical conclusion is that expressing rhetorical support for the IRA in Northern Ireland is not a threat to the British state, for whom Sinn Féin performs the role of managing the province’s quotidian affairs. Expressing support for Hezbollah in London, however, is quite a different matter.

Northern Ireland’s historic ethnic conflict is dormant enough that what is technically illegal can be safely ignored. In the colonial metropole, on the other hand, intercommunal relations, symbolically expressed through attitudes to the Gaza war, have become such a live issue that the heavy hand of the law rapidly reaches onto the stage. It is now more often London than Belfast where the police finds itself acting like a harassed colonial gendarmerie, policing rival parades, scrutinising placards and keeping hostile community groups apart, all the while fending off accusations of two-tier partiality. Mainland Britons rarely understand Northern Ireland’s inner complexities, taboos and selectively applied laws. Kneecap’s unintentional brush with the British state shows that the reverse is also true.

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Aris Roussinos is an UnHerd columnist and a former war reporter.

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