Séamas O'Reilly: We are talking about Kneecap while more than 50,000 Palestinians have died

Irish Examiner

03-05-2025

I didn't want to talk about Kneecap this week, but here we are. Barring their film, which I greatly enjoyed, I know next to nothing about them. Except, of course, for the controversies that have been swirling around them of late.
The latest has been this week's storm over their chanting of violent slogans, specifically 'the only good Tory is a dead Tory', and 'kill your MP'.
Condemnations were swift from sitting politicians in Britain and Ireland, while the police are said to be investigating these chants – and others in which they allegedly espouse support for Hamas and Hezbollah – under terror legislation.
My own feeling is that it is your right and mine to think it was callous or stupid for Kneecap to have shouted these things from their stage. Britain has had recent and painful experience of murdered MPs, and such sentiments are understandably shocking and painful — both to their grieving loved ones and to any of us who believe agitating for political murder, even rhetorically, is crass and moronic.
It was likely correct, in that context, for Kneecap to have released the statement they did this week apologising for any offence caused. It was also correct for them to highlight the context of performance in which these words were uttered.
One main reason I didn't want to talk about Kneecap is because none of this is new, and pretending it is makes me feel insane. Punk and hip-hop bands have been singing about killing queens and presidents for decades. There are entire strains of country and folk music predicated on murder and destruction.
If you've attended any metal festival in Britain or Ireland for the past 30 years, you'll have heard detailed instructions on bloodshed, desecration, necrophilia, and bestiality.
One wonders if police were informed about the 1995 release of Boulder's Kick The Pregnant, Devourment's Molesting The Decapitated, or the entire roster of Italian grindcore label Rotting Abortion Records. In those cases, it's clear that such grotesque sentiments are deliberate, performative exercises in distasteful overstatement, designed to shock, offend and, yes, to bleakly amuse.
Visit any town in Ireland large enough to sport a shop that sells bongs and lava lamps to teens wearing safety pin facial piercings, and you might find those records there, pride of place, without the world around it having collapsed in on itself.
Cataloguing these kinds of things is trite, because nobody in their right mind thinks that any of those latter provocations — however repulsive or disgusting — fit the definition of motivating speech or violent incitement in law.
Unfortunately, the law has not always seen it this way. We are not so far removed from the days when The Dubliners' Seven Drunken Nights was banned from the national airwaves for its lewd content in 1967, or the satanic panic of the late 1980s — which told us that Ozzy Osbourne's Suicide Solution was leading listeners to kill themselves.
The Dubliners' Seven Drunken Nights was banned from national airwaves in 1967
Sadly, we needn't even go back that far. Last year, the University of Manchester found nearly 70 cases in which prosecutors had used lyrics from rap songs as evidence of either violent intent or 'bad character' against 252 defendants in Britain's criminal courts.
Here, too, the fact that a defendant had uttered — or even been adjacent to people uttering — violent lyrics was enough for those words to be entered into evidence against them in criminal proceedings. One wonders how Johnny Cash — now so beloved a figure that the US ambassador to Ireland was serenaded by a Mountjoy Prison choir singing his works just two years ago — would have fared in the dock, if the words 'I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die' were repeated back to him by a stern QC in a powdered wig.
It's asinine, in 2025, to be holding any of those things to the same standard as actual incitement toward bodily harm.
To hold just some of them to that standard, and not the others, is more asinine still. It's also jarringly obvious that this latest controversy has been dredged up in the wake of Kneecap's Coachella performance, in which they agitated for the people of Palestine and highlighted the ongoing genocide being perpetrated against them by Israel, courting outcry from — among others — Sharon Osbourne, whose memories of her own husband's time in the dock at the height of the Satanic Panic appear to have faded.
It would take a startling level of credulity to believe these two things are not connected, nor part of a deliberate and obvious smear campaign aimed at undercutting the influence of one of the most prominent pro-Palestinian musical groups on Earth.
Which is where we arrive at the main reason I didn't want to talk about Kneecap this week. More than 50,000 Palestinians have been reported dead by the Gaza health ministry — 59% of whom are women, children, and the elderly.
The absence of public officials, killed in large numbers and their institutions demolished and bombed, means these figures are likely vastly understated. The persecution of journalists — at least 232 of whom have been killed, according to Al Jazeera — makes reporting on new fatalities harder still.
British medical journal The Lancet suggests figures closer to 65,000 or even 80,000 are more likely. Some 1.9m people have been displaced and are now at extreme risk of starvation and disease.
These attacks have continued with almost total impunity, despite widespread evidence of war crimes being beamed into every phone on the planet for the past 18 months.
And we are being asked, time and again, to centre in our minds the conduct and content of three rappers, and the decorum with which their opposition to mass-scale murder and displacement is expressed on a festival stage.
What we choose to talk about says a lot about our supposed reverence for decency, humanity, and social norms. What we choose not to talk about speaks much greater volumes still.
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