‘Our name is dirt’: how stigma of kneecapping haunts one Northern Ireland family

Northern Ireland hip-hop trio Kneecap on stage at the Rock en Seine music festival near Paris. They embody defiance for a generation that views the Troubles as history. Photograph: Guillaume Baptiste/AFP/Getty Images

For Jeanitta McCabe, the word kneecap conjures not a rap trio on stage but a memory that plays in her head, unspooling again and again in a loop.

It is the night of 13 September 1990 and she is a 10-year-old at home in bed in Newry, County Down, when Northern Ireland’s Troubles come barrelling through the family’s front door.