"If we win an Oscar, we’ll take it to Cash My Gold, melt it down and get some gold teeth made." It's been Kneecap's year, we just lived through it

(Image credit: Peadar ó Goill)

When Kneecap vocalist Naoise Ó Cairealláin looks back over his band’s year, it’s not the most high-profile, headline-making flashpoints on their 2024 highlights reel which gives him the most satisfaction. It's a rather simple one.

Following the release of the west Belfast hip-hop band’s self-titled ‘heightened reality’ biopic this summer, Ó Cairealláin got a message on Instagram from a young woman he’d been friends with years previously. As a direct result, she said, of watching the Kneecap film, she had decided to enrol her child at an Irish-language primary school, even though she herself, or none of her family, spoke Gaeilge.