How Ireland fetishises history Edgy nationalists seek solidarity abroad

Named after a particularly excruciating form of punishment meted out by the IRA, the Irish rap group Kneecap come from Belfast but not from the British Isles. The archipelago on which they live contains a sizeable chunk of non-British territory known as the Republic of Ireland, meaning there’s no accurate name for the group of islands as a whole. To complicate matters even further, some Irish Republicans reserve the phrase “The Republic of Ireland” for a future, politically united nation, so what country Dublin is currently the capital of becomes a bit of a problem. The official name of the nation is Eire, but nobody in Ireland calls it that.

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. 

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.

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.