On Kneecap: Youth and Hip-Hop in Northern Ireland

‘What has hip-hop got to do with the Irish?’ is a question boomerang-ed to us in the beginning of Kneecap (2024) named eponymously after the Belfast hip-hop band and screened at the 14th edition of the Dharamshala International Film Festival (DIFF) from 31 October to 02 November 2025. The question percolates and returns to us throughout the film, directed by the Irish filmmaker Rich Peppiatt and becomes significant considering how many of us first encountered Kneecap following the public furore after the BBC decided not to livestream their Glastonbury performance, where they were one of the only two performers to even bring up the genocide in Gaza. The trio were performing after the arrest of their rapper Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh or Mo Chara upon his criticism of Israel after holding up the Lebanese Hezbollah flag. Despite the best efforts of the UK Prime Minister to stop their performance, they emerged on stage with Chara screaming, “Glastonbury, I am a free man!” to a madding crowd. Indeed, hip-hop has a lot to do with the Irish.

Immediately after landing in a high tempo party where Chara and his co-rapper Naoise Ó Cairealláin aka Móglaí Bap bumped lines while creating a space for Irish speakers to socialise and dance, we witness Chara being arrested. In the semi-fictionalised world of the film, this is where music teacher and Irish speaker JJ Ó Dochartaigh—who would later become their third member, DJ Próvai—enters as a translator in between the tense police interrogation where Chara refused to speak English. In reality, they had met at one of these parties. Choosing sides was what made most of Irish history, schooling and urban planning, and good boy Dochartaigh is baptised anew as bad by lying to save Chara, knowing a far worse fate awaited the young boy with Irish republican sentiments, who could not stand England. As Chara said, “We are known for our love for throwing shit at the peelers (police) no matter where in Northern Ireland you came from,” and perhaps that was Dochartaigh’s shot.

Chara and Bap are incapable of not raising a finger to the establishment. Even during their laughable stint as altar boys at a Catholic church where they burnt marijuana in their church’s incense thurible—having accidentally acquired a bushel during a police chase—and intoxicated everyone, causing double the number of people to turn up the following Sunday. Another notch in the bedpost of religion’s tryst with substances, which has equally delightful Indian cinematic parallels—sacrilegious in Oh My God as Paresh Rawal circulated alcohol in the name of holy water, and concerning in the Bobby Deol starrer Badnam Ashram, where cocaine-infused sweets ‘influenced’ the followers. True or not, that stint became a precursor to Kneecap distributing drugs in their early concerts as the gateway to getting followers amidst a highly persecuted environment where the new Irish Republican Army (IRA) cracked down on drugs after having subsumed the Republican Action Against Drugs (RAAD) within it. The church story and, in fact, Kneecap’s existence itself becomes a blow to the more controlling and conservative sides of republicanism whose wrath the trio had faced—after incredulously shipping substances in via post delivered by a fifty-two-year-old postman—until, like any other cartel, RAAD realised drugs meant profit. Such pompous shrines are built on hollow principles, Kneecap seems to smirk.

One look into Chara and Bap’s hard-hitting lyrics assured Dochartaigh that hip-hop was the duo’s route, but whoever has heard of Irish hip-hop? Turns out everyone wanted to. Belfast has somehow emerged as a hotbed for young musicians experimenting with alternative music. The ’70s saw Terry Hooley start his record store—on a fool's errand, according to many—bang on an IRA-bombed street, calling it ‘Good Vibrations’, riffing off The Beach Boys’ American psychedelic hit from the ’60s. ‘Good Vibrations’ (2012) showed how Hooley single-handedly bottled up the music teenage Irish angst could produce in vinyl, launching Irish punk, which resonated with a generation of young people looking for release and a voice of their own amidst never-ending political strife which began earlier than they were born.

The physicality of war is something the film delves into quite strongly, as the anxieties and tensions of wartime must boil down to something. Turns out they manifested themselves through Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) or Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD) in Ireland’s “ceasefire generation” which Chara and Bap are part of, who spewed out working-class frustrations of being perpetually chased by the Irish police through hip-hop with lyrics like “I'm a H.O.O.D, low life scum, that's what they say about me” and roleplayed in bed their desire of wanting the North to be free, acting out nationalist and loyalist factions. The heavy burden of a tired generation and being berated by a “dead” ex-IRA father in hiding who is resurrected to admonish his son for being such a waste almost makes Chara fidgety and his life a game of snakes and ladders. Will Chara pass through a loyalist parade silently and not get into trouble after his arrest, or will he erupt in anger?

Kneecap has been accused of being pro-IRA, considering their very name refers to the practice of shooting in the knee by the IRA or using the Balaklava and violent lyrics like “Beat the fascists then the drinking session, get that note off my car, it's gonna be a bloodbath.” However, the fact that Chara can only relate to his father when he sheds his IRA persona to become a messiah almost—fancy Michael Fassbender playing that, as the man is so LA with his own Hollywood lore, sometimes we gloss over his Irish heritage—and saves his son from the anti-druggers, highlights there are aspects of IRA’s militancy that Kneecap will never empathise with. It is difficult to, after years of living with bated teeth waiting for the next bomb to go off, even if it meant knocking down the British a few pegs. Even though Chara might find euphemisms like his partner saying, “Wanna blow you like a Brighton Hotel”, sexy.

Another conservative accusation levied at them was—is hip-hop the right ambassador for getting the Irish language recognised? Dochartaigh’s partner who was campaigning towards what is now the Identity and Language (Northern Ireland) Act, insinuated to Chara and Bap that perhaps it was a bad time for them to make hip-hop and speak about being low lives—hated by the Irish police who had actually called Chara a “low life scum” not too long ago. Unbeknownst to her, it was Dochartaigh's Balaklava-concealed irreverence that she had witnessed on television flashing “Brits Out” scribbled on his behind during their second public performance in the very pub Prince William and Kate Middleton had visited a day prior.

In many ways Kneecap asks us to look closer, as like the thurible, there are a bunch of others playing their own games of snakes and ladders like the mild-mannered Dochartaigh headbanging his way into becoming a hip-hop DJ and getting fired, like the best of us. It is almost homoerotic, the first drug-fuelled night of making music, after which they lay on the ground in a near-ritualistic circle, hands everywhere. Kneecap themselves lean into this inevitable homoeroticism following male-only bands from time immemorial, once telling an interviewer they met on Grindr.

This fantasy of being the good Irish citizen working with placing the Irish language on a pedestal is broken apart, even as Dochartaigh attempts to tear himself away from the other two. For a while we are subjected to his painful patience, listening to the clangs of bored students’ amateur workings of instruments, after his night making the best music he has ever heard. It is as if Kneecap is elbowing us saying, he has got to admit we are the best. It is a certain kind of self-mythologising, but perhaps steering away from being Kendrick Lamar’s cultural soothsayer to the more irreverent kind, which has something to do with young people and seeing the Irish language itself as something to be played with—like recycling archaic Irish terms like “snaois” which originally meant snuff, became their word for cocaine.

Towards this, Dochartaigh delivered one of the most memorable lines in the film, comparing the Irish language to the last dodo stuck behind glass in a zoo. “Look but don't touch,” he said, “But you must break the glass and set the dodo free.” As Hooley said, “When it comes to punk, New York has the haircut, London has the trousers but Belfast has the reason.” And reason enough they do for hip-hop too. So what if the documentary was made a mere eight years into the trio forming—pop boyband documentaries have been made for far less.

To learn more about films screening at this edition of DIFF, watch Sivaranjini speaking about her film Victoria (2024), also read Banhi Sarkar’s essay on Vipin Radhakrishnan’s Angammal (2024).

To learn more about the previous editions of DIFF, read Mallika Visvanathan’s interview with the founders Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam and watch the previous episodes of In Person with Udit Khurana as he discusses his film Taak (2024), Jhansy Giting Dokgre Marak on her film Chaware (2023), Gavati Wad on her film O Seeker (2024) and Vani Subramanian on her film Cinema Pe Cinema (2024).

All stills are from Kneecap (2024) by Rich Peppiatt. Images courtesy of the artist.