Early last week hundreds of young people filed into the Telegraph Building, a concert venue in central Belfast, to see a popular working-class hip-hop trio called Kneecap.
The band raps about rebellion and defiance, and uses images of petrol bombs and a burning police Land Rover. One of the trio wears a green, white and orange balaclava.
The song Get Your Brits Out (it opens with, “Guess who’s back on the news/It’s your favourite republican hoods”) has had more than 2 million streams on Spotify.
The gig could be viewed as a validation of the Good Friday agreement. During the Troubles, paramilitaries used to shoot alleged delinquents in the knee. Now, 25 years later, rappers have reclaimed a word that once inspired dread. What was this if not a peace dividend?
Joe Biden and Rishi Sunak will visit Belfast this week to mark the anniversary of a deal that largely ended the Troubles. Bill and Hillary Clinton and other dignitaries will follow, all bearing similar messages: Northern Ireland ended a cycle of carnage in 1998 and now brims with economic potential. Rebukes to the Democratic Unionist party for paralysing power-sharing at Stormont may tinge proceedings but won’t spoil the mood of celebration that Northern Ireland has turned the page on the Troubles.
But has it? Paramilitary groups still prowl Northern Ireland – they peddle drugs, run extortion rackets, recruit teenagers, inflict so-called punishment attacks and on occasion target police. And Kneecap, among other artists, have updated and popularised paramilitary iconography. Whether this is satire or insidious provocation depends, like so much else in Northern Ireland, on who you ask.
“Nobody is going to put shackles on what Kneecap can and can’t say. We’ve had enough of that on this island for long enough, whether it was the Brits, the church or the media,” the trio, DJ Próvai, Móglaí Bap and Mo Chara, said via email. “If we, as people from west Belfast and the Creggan, can’t satirise it, who can? Art has a responsibility to put a lens on to society and tell its own story. That story can be positive, negative, irreverent and all in between.”
Last week’s gig was not quite real. The band were playing themselves for an Irish-language feature film, with fans acting as extras, but the performance underscored an inconvenient truth. The Troubles are over but there is no agreement on who started it, who won and what it meant. A battle for memory is being waged in the arts, in politics and on social media. Instead of bombs and bullets it is fought with words, images and memes. And the winner gets to shape the present.
“There is nostalgia for the Troubles,” said Rosemary Jenkinson, a poet and short story writer from east Belfast. “All these protocol things – it’s documents. The present is dry, whereas the past was flesh. There was humour and danger, and that’s potent.”
There is no appetite for revived bloodshed, and pressure on the DUP to accept the Windsor framework – Sunak’s tweaked version of the post-Brexit Northern Ireland protocol – pales in comparison with the past, according to Jenkinson, whose new short story collection is called Love in the Time of Chaos.
Just as people in Britain marinate themselves in second world war stories, many in Northern Ireland remain in thrall to the Troubles, she said. “The whole gunman thing – it’s more a cult than a culture. It has been romanticised because we’re not sure of our identity now. We don’t know if there will be a unity vote. That’s partly why people are looking back in a romantic way.”
Sinn Féin walks a fine line through recent history. Once an IRA mouthpiece, it is now mainstream as Northern Ireland’s biggest party and appears poised for power in the republic. It gives full-throated support to the Good Friday agreement and condemns violent dissident republican groups who have waged sporadic attacks since 1998.
However the party defends the Provisional IRA’s campaign from 1969 to 1998 – there was “no alternative”, says Michelle O’Neill, the party’s putative first minister. It honours IRA killers as heroes while describing the New IRA, which shot and wounded a police officer in February, as thugs.
Republican dissidents draw comfort from a pattern of post-conflict sanctification. Irish people initially pilloried the Easter 1916 rebels, only to later elevate them to founding fathers.
President Michael D Higgins, an army brass band and, weather permitting, an Air Corps fly past will honour the Rising at a ceremony in Dublin on Monday.
“You go from being a bunch of terrorists in 1916 to being the good old IRA, and to an extent that’s happening again,” said Richard O’Rawe, a former IRA prisoner turned writer. “The Irish are a very romantic race in terms of their history. It’s almost as if there’s this burning desire to look at things in the most positive light.”
O’Rawe has conjured a fictional IRA man turned bank robber, Ructions O’Hare, in his novels Northern Heist and Goering’s Gold. The author makes no apology for investing his antihero, who is an amalgam of several republicans, with charisma. “The movement wasn’t full of guys with big long faces walking around saying woe is me. There were great and funny characters.”
Time is smoothing Sinn Féin’s version of the Troubles, according to O’Rawe, who has accused the party of glossing over its strategic calculations during the 1981 hunger strikes. “A lot of the people who were about during the Troubles and would remember the more gruesome facts are dead. People tend to almost bin the dirty stuff, the bad operations –Bloody Friday, Enniskillen, La Mon. It’s quite a list. Everyone committed atrocious operations, not least the Brits – Bloody Sunday, Ballymurphy – and the loyalists – McGurk’s, Rising Sun, the Sean Graham bookies. Too many to enumerate.”
Critics of Sinn Féin say its defence of the Provos and the lack of a South Africa-style truth and reconciliation commission in Northern Ireland have helped dissidents claim the mantle of physical force republicanism.
Police said they had received “strong” intelligence that dissidents planned to attack officers over this Easter weekend, They also warned of potential street violence in Derry. Last month MI5 raised the terrorism threat level from substantial to severe.
Máiría Cahill, a commentator who has spoken out about sexual abuse by an IRA member, said republican claims that “the war came to us” deflected responsibility. “It’s as if it was everybody else’s fault except ours and we just fought back.”
Sinn Féin’s narrative has gained currency among young people in the republic. In a Sunday Times poll, people under 35 were more likely to attribute most killings to the British army rather than the IRA. In fact the IRA was responsible for about half of the 3,700 fatalities and the British army, directly, for about 8%.
When the Guardian last year asked 12 randomly selected students at Trinity College Dublin to estimate the total death toll, guesses ranged from 50 to 20,000. Only one student correctly put the figure at between 3,000 and 4,000.
In the Sunday Times poll, less than 26% of young people knew about the bombings in Brighton, Enniskillen and Warrington. They were more likely to recognise Sinn Féin’s Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness for their the peacemaking roles than John Hume and David Trimble, who shared a Nobel peace prize. There have been calls to improve teaching of the Troubles in schools on both sides of the border.
Sinn Féin’s emergence as a youth-friendly, TikTok-savvy party has gone hand in hand with the Adams’s reinvention. In recent years the party’s former leader has commented and tweeted about rubber ducks, teddy bears, puppies and trampolining naked with his dog. A bound collection of his tweets features a selfie with a goat. He has more than 300,000 followers across Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.
Adams’s collection of recipes that sustained republican envoys, The Negotiators Cook Book, puns about “the peas process”, “the frying column” – referencing IRA flying columns – and “long quiche”, a play on the former prison known as Long Kesh. Sinn Féin merchandise now includes jokey wares such as a mug bearing the words Tiocfaidh ár Latte, a pun on the republican adage “tiocfaidh ár la” (our day will come).
Loyalist rhetoric and merchandise, in contrast, is seldom playful. Iconography veers from solemn to menacing. “There is a seriousness to it. To reimagine King Billy with humour, say, wouldn’t work,” said Brian Anderson, a Methodist minister at the East Belfast Mission.
With questions over Northern Ireland’s future in the UK, loyalists were in no mood to joke, said Jenkinson. “When you have everything to win and nothing to lose, you can play with things. If you have everything to lose you’re not going to poke fun at yourself so much.”
The British government is widely seen as attempting its own rewriting of history in the form of a legacy bill that will shield former British soldiers – and other combatants – from prosecution. The legislation has infuriated victims’ groups.
This leaves the field clear for artists such as Kneecap to repurpose paramilitary tropes – to the consternation of some politicians, who fear the ostensible satire is grooming a new generation. The trio rejected that. “We find it funny that a piece of art can provoke more of a reaction from politicians than actual real life,” they said via email.
The Good Friday agreement brought peace to the streets but not peace of mind to a society that remained segregated and deprived, they said. “We are grateful that we don’t have to live through what our parents and grandparents endured, but we have to recognise that this ‘state’ is failing a lot of people on every side of the divides.”
That is unlikely to mollify the band’s critics, who consider them provocateurs. A similar controversy dogs folk group the Wolfe Tones over their song Celtic Symphony. Ireland’s women’s football team were filmed chanting “ooh, ah, up the ‘Ra” – words from the song’s chorus – to celebrate qualifying for the World Cup. The footage went viral and triggered heated debate about whether this was glorifying the IRA or mere exuberance. The controversy propelled the song to the top of Ireland’s iTunes charts.
Young people have chanted the chorus at west Belfast festivals for years, said Cahill, who is a greatniece of a legendary IRA figure. “The fact you have 10,000 young people delighted to sing about these IRA men and women from the past is a sad indication of just how little we have moved on.”
