Fans rally behind Kneecap after London court appearance: ‘If you're supporting Ireland, you're supporting Kneecap'
Kneecap's
place in the Irish zeitgeist was voiced without hesitation by fans of the Irish-language rap group streaming into
Dublin's
Fairview Park
venue in their thousands on Thursday evening.
Having jockeyed for position in cultural and social spaces in recent years, for many fans the group now stands both at the intersection and forefront of Irish music and politics.
Eimear O'Connor from Finglas, Dublin, has been a fan of Kneecap since the release of their song Cearta. For her, the group is all encompassing – from Bohemian Football Club and Bang Bang coffee shop to recognising the lasting impact of colonialism on Ireland and
Palestine
.
'Rapping as Gaeilge is a huge way to bring Irish into modern culture and get people interested in it,' O'Connor said. 'Also, given Irish traditional music and the linguistics of Gaeilge, it works so well with rap.'
READ MORE
Like other fans, she was excited to hear what Kneecap might have to say about
Mo Chara's
(AKA Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh)
London court appearance on Wednesday
.
Ó hAnnaidh was charged under UK antiterrorism legislation with showing support for a proscribed organisation after it was alleged he draped himself in a
Hizbullah
flag at a London gig last November.
Rebecca Nichols and Keith Henderson said they are unsupportive of the case against him.
'It's absolutely ridiculous, there's no evidence,' Nichols said. 'Even if you don't agree with what he said, does he not have free speech to say it?'
Pointing to the Irish Tricolours and Palestinian keffiyehs donned by surrounding concert goers, she added: 'If you're supporting Ireland, you're supporting Kneecap.'
[
Kneecap case: 'A woman pointed to a sniggering Móglaí Bap as the magistrate asked if anyone knew an Irish interpreter'
Opens in new window
]
Henderson said it is more important than ever to show support for the group, who he originally began to follow because of their use of the Irish language. 'It's good to keep the Irish language alive,' Henderson said. 'It's also funny rap, it's entertaining'.
Rhia McConnell, an Irish teacher from Cork, credits Kneecap with reviving her students' interest in the language. 'It's given some of them a huge love for Irish, the
Kneecap film
really helped a lot,' McConnell said.
'People in their 20s and 30s relate to them too because their music is just so modern.'
The link between their music and advocacy seems undeniable – fan Cheryl Walshe said they have introduced children to what colonialism truly means and 'also act as a counter to some of the racist rhetoric' that young people may be exposed to.
Thursday night marked the numerical pinnacle of their career with Fairview Park hosting their biggest solo gig to date with a
capacity crowd of 8,000.
Another appearance at Westminster Magistrates Court awaits Mo Chara who is contesting the charge and has not yet entered a plea. The group may face rocky times ahead, but steady support is strongly behind them.
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Irish Times
12 minutes ago
- Irish Times
Niall Montgomery ‘originated an Irish form of jazz-inspired sound poetry'
In June 2015, Christine O'Neill published An Irishwoman's Diary on architect, poet, artist and literary critic Niall Montgomery in The Irish Times . This piece and O'Neill's subsequent book, Niall Montgomery: Dublinman (Ashgate, 2015), mark the centenary of the author's birth and stand out as the best biographical work on Montgomery. But what about his poetry? When I first learned that Montgomery had put together a manuscript of poems shortly before his death, I was floored. The questions one asks oneself as an editor are: these poems, are they any good? Have they been published before? Will they make a splash? Wait, is the book already put together? Can I publish it? If the answer to these questions is yes, then one has the editorial equivalent of a slam dunk. READ MORE Niall Montgomery (June 24th, 1915 – March 11th, 1987) is well-known as a Dublin architect and literary scholar, but his poetry is seldom mentioned despite a sporadic publishing career that spanned more than five decades. Montgomery never published a book of his poems. Dublinman collects his essays on James Joyce, Samuel Beckett and Georgian Dublin. terminal 1: Arrivals – a book published by Flat Singles Press that will be launched in Dublin on June 20th – is the first collection of Montgomery's poetry in a trade edition. It was not a slam dunk job. Collecting the early poems was a difficult task. Montgomery's lack of book publication during his lifetime necessitated tracking down out-of-print magazines and searching for early drafts in archives in Ireland and the United States. It is a gross understatement to say Montgomery's poetry is 'under-appreciated', 'obscure seeming', 'abstract', 'modernist' and, if one is feeling generous, 'misunderstood'. The seven long poems included in the collection were difficult to find but their quality speaks for itself, though the pieces are complex and perhaps impenetrable for some readers. Some of them are 'ensemble pieces' that speak in many voices. They achieve an unprecedented integration of clashing poetic and demotic registers. Terminal 1: Arrivals, a posthumous collection by Irish poet Niall Montgomery It is also difficult to classify Montgomery's poetry because his poetic career passed through two distinct phases: a period of arrival during the 1930s and early 1940s when his work met with a significant early reception, and a second flowering in the early 1970s after struggling to publish for many years. In the first phase, Montgomery published in important journals and avant-garde magazines, including Contemporary Poetry and Prose , transition , Wales , Ireland To-day and Furioso . In 1970, Michael Smith and Trevor Joyce featured Montgomery's unpublished song-poem, London Transport (1939), in The Lace Curtain , along with two new poems. Smith would go on to publish Montgomery's later poems and essays in five separate issues of that magazine. This late, second-phase recognition revived Montgomery's hope of publishing a book-length collection and was followed by a small flourishing of new, short poems. He called the book project T E R M I N A L but died before it could be published. terminal 1 collects Montgomery's earliest published work for the first time with the other long poems he wrote during the 1930s. Taken from his most prolific period, these poems mark Montgomery's first significant poetic achievement and emphasise his use of the long form. Other posthumous collections are needed. A critical edition of Montgomery's Irish translations would do much to establish his substantial bilingual contribution to Irish poetry. A second volume of his later poetry focusing on his use of shorter forms is already underway. Montgomery was incredible while young. One might dismiss it as precociousness and laugh at how John Milton wanted to be considered a prodigy well into his thirties. You might not think it, but an entire volume on Montgomery's early career is justified. For example, in 1932, at the age of 17, he wrote to Eugene Jolas, editor of the by then well-known transition magazine which was publishing Joyce's Work in Progress as well as other expressionist, post-expressionist, Surrealist and Dada artists. Taking a cue from Joyce and what would become Finnegans Wake (1939), Jolas focused transition on experimental writing and provided an important forum for the international avant-garde. Montgomery's letter is best described as ardent fan mail, full of strange Latin-English wordplay. In his implied praise for transition , Montgomery clearly echoes Jolas's so-called 'interlinguistic experiments' and the magazine's announcement in 1932 that 'Poetry is vertical'. montgomery; 132 Rock Road Booterstown Dublin ; transeunti eugene jolas viaticum igitor rejoyce 13 mar 2 1 rue de sévigné paris (3e) dURINg an ad liminn brousing with some HORIZontal lenten PASTords i determined and REALised. ENclosed my camera PANS v e r t i c a l l y from the wreason of tsalty TSELIOT and EVEn contraeonceivARLY PAULtergeist vulAIRY I HAVE SICKERED ON THE SUBLIMINAL ETHOS orphically ad limina cheaply ex cathedra MANtically YoUrS Niall O'lstat Montgomery He had already made a name for himself as a poet by the summer of 1934, when under the name Andrew Belis, Beckett mentioned him in Recent Irish Poetry—an acerbic review for Bookman magazine—alongside several Irish poets who the author categorized as either outmoded revivalists or 'aware' artists. Beckett ironically claimed to know 'nothing' of the poetry of Niall Sheridan, Donagh MacDonagh or Irene Haugh but the mere mention of the names ambiguously sets them apart from the poets Beckett attacks in the review. Knowing nothing almost becomes a compliment when Beckett adds two words to Montgomery's 'nothing'; he writes, 'of Mr Niall Montgomery's poetry', he knows 'nothing at all'. Beckett and Montgomery's friendship began around this time and lasted for the rest of Montgomery's life. They became the sort of friends who exchange Christmas cards and know one another's family. Of his Dublin friends named in Beckett's review, Niall Sheridan was the most encouraging of Montgomery's poetry. He consoled Montgomery after his collection of translations had been rejected in 1934: sorry to hear that the GÚM refused your poems. Where the hell was the GÚM in 1916, anyway. I'd seriously advise you to publish them yourself. These poems were part of a monumental translation project. Christine O'Neil has documented Montgomery and Devlin's attempt in the early 1930s to translate 'more than 200 pages' of modernist and avant-garde French poetry into Irish, a corpus which, according to Tobias Harris, even 'included work by Tristan Tzara, the Romanian-born poet and performance artist who acted as a bridge between the Paris and Berlin Dada scenes'. Apart from the two translations included in the appendix terminal 1 , none of the Irish material has been published. I can make an even more shocking claim: Montgomery is more of a London poet, vis-à-vis The Waste Land, than a Dublin poet. He spent time in London in the late 1930s for his architectural training. With Montgomery's ensemble pieces from this period, like London Transport and Swing Tides of March This Time Darling, it is important to observe that he is writing as an expatriate rather than as a stay-at-home Dubliner. Sheridan wrote to him in London on January 16th, 1939, 'I'm terribly sorry for you living in that pagan country. Apart from missing you here [in Dublin], it's a terrible fate for anyone.' It is also true that a sense of the city of Dublin is inseparable from Niall Montgomery's name and from all his work. Some readers may first see 'London' and the influence of 'tsalty tseliot' before noticing 'whitewash and gorsecurves' and the distinctive Irishness of Montgomery's imagery. At different times, Montgomery likened his poetry to music ('TRANSPOSE it for me please it's still much too high'). He also deeply admired jazz. In an essay on painting published in 1944, he compared abstract painting and jazz: 'Both are very much of the twenties and thirties, [and] reflect the neuroses of contemporary life. At its best the dominant feature in jazz is improvisation, with the strange, unpredictable line of an instrumental solo against a rhythmic formalised bass; in 'abstract' art this startling flowing line informs the composition.' His understanding of jazz informs how music is employed in 'blinds somewhere draw the blinds' and Swing Tides of March This Time Darling. A bassline underpins rhythmic changes between stanzas in both poems. In one section of 'blinds' Montgomery establishes his analogy between jazz and writing with alto-bovine-absurdity: in the higher brackets however elastically scrolled in an uncountable rococo idiom steely and irrevocable behind the ogham stones seven secret cows in double-breasted dinner-jackets go atavistic on their tender saxophones In Swing Tides of March, big band music becomes a central motif ('trombone-routine of brekekekex-coagulation') and the text ends with a radio announcer signing off. London Transport is arguably Montgomery's most difficult poem. It is an ensemble piece that develops the polyvocal technique of Swing Tides of March in a more definite, and almost prescriptive style. One might say that Montgomery originated an Irish form of jazz-inspired sound poetry distinguished by its polyphony. The seven poems in terminal 1 are the mark of his poetic achievement. Joseph LaBine is a Canadian poet and scholar specialising in modern Celtic literature. TERMINAL 1: Arrivals by Niall Montgomery, edited by Joseph LaBine, is published by Flat Singles Press.
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