Send Kneecap to prison? This moral panic has reached its ridiculous, feverish apex

A strange thing happened in the UK last week. The band Kneecap stopped being what they were – three guys who rap in Irish – and became something else entirely. They stopped being musicians and became conduits through which a collective, countrywide shuddering discomfort could be disseminated.

Kneecap stopped being Kneecap. Now they were a memetic, deformed, contextless thing that was important enough to be debated in parliament and dangerous enough to be banned, potentially, from Glastonbury. 

It came after old footage emerged that appeared to show band members chanting “up Hamas, up Hezbollah” at one gig and allegedly encouraging fans to “kill your local MP” at another.

The public were duly horrified, citing the murders of the MPs Jo Cox and David Amess, and Kneecap issued an apology to their families. “We reject any suggestion that we would seek to incite violence against any MP or individual,” the group said. 

And yet their words were treated with more gravity than other attacks on British MPs. In March last year, the Conservative party’s largest donor said Diane Abbott, the Labour backbencher, makes you “want to hate all black women” and “should be shot”; in 2019, a video emerged showing soldiers from the parachute regiment firing their guns at a large picture of Jeremy Corbyn taped to the wall.

Those attacks were made by British people, within Britain. There is a different set of standards for Kneecap.

The band’s enduring feature is that they have always made people feel uncomfortable. In their early days, they had their music removed from RTÉ after complaints about drug references. They were escorted from their own gigs at student unions in the Republic of Ireland while people decided whether or not it was OK to make oblique and obvious references to the Troubles and the IRA.

Less than a decade later, they’re winning Baftas and playing at Coachella festival. Their messaging didn’t change – but their audience did. And that growing audience is increasingly uncomfortable with how they use their platform. (In England, you are encouraged to “use your platform” as a famous person only to speak out on prescribed issues, such as the declining bee population or Ukraine.) 

Perhaps that’s because Kneecap are from a very different Ireland than the Ireland that Britain is used to seeing. 

Irish culture has enjoyed something of a renaissance in England in recent years. Guinness has never been more popular; Paul Mescal is quasi-royalty. But the Irishness that’s celebrated in England has become, as time goes on, a sanitised and twee Irishness, one that flattens the country and the people who live within it – and outside it – to a smiling, O’Neills shorts wearing, darkly sexy bunch who do not have any political views about the occupation of Ireland, and whose view of Ireland and Palestine as existing in a shared struggle is a cartoonish and childish false equivalence.