Speaking Irish with Kneecap | The New Yorker

The members of the Irish-language hip-hop group Kneecap, Liam Óg Ó Hannaidh, Naoise Ó Cairealláin, and JJ Ó Dochartaigh—stage names Mo Chara, Móglaí Bap, and DJ Próvaí—jumped out of an Uber at 30th Street Station in Philadelphia the other day. After glancing at the train schedule, the three Northern Ireland residents raided a Pret a Manger, conferring with each other in Irish. (“If you can’t understand what we’re saying, that’s because we’re speaking Irish,” Ó Cairealláin had told a crowd in Philly the night before.) They wrestled their giant suitcases down escalators to their track. Opening the food, Ó Hannaidh posed a question to his mates: “An bhfuil ubh ag teastáil ó aon duine?,” or “Does anybody want an egg?”

It wasn’t Kneecap’s first trip to America; that was at the outbreak of COVID, in 2020, when their gig was cancelled and they got stranded in Boston. This time, they were touring after “Kneecap,” their eponymous bio-pic, won the NEXT Audience Award at Sundance, the first Irish-language film ever to play there. The trio subsequently appeared on “The Tonight Show,” and this summer Ireland submitted their film for an Oscar, in the international-feature category. On the Northeast Regional to Moynihan Station, they squeezed into two seats facing one another, knees bumping. “This is incredible,” Ó Cairealláin said.

“Very intimate,” Ó Hannaidh added. “This would be illegal at home.”

The “Kneecap” movie, in which the rappers play themselves, depicts the rise of the group, whose members become part of a civil-rights campaign to make Irish a legal language in Northern Ireland. The film blends fact and fiction, though some of the most unbelievable parts are true. Ó Dochartaigh really was teaching Irish-language classes at a Catholic school when a video on social media inspired an investigation. (“A masked member moons the camera with ‘Brits Out’ across his buttocks,” a nuns’ report noted.)

“I used a Sharpie, yeah,” Ó Dochartaigh recalled.

Also true: their music was banned on public radio because of its drug references, a criticism that conservative Northern Irish papers still raise and that the band sees as a distraction from the fact that their generation, the so-called Ceasefire Babies, born since the Good Friday Agreement, are living through a well-documented mental-health crisis: the suicide rate in Northern Ireland has doubled since 1998. “Belfast is a very medicated place,” Ó Hannaidh said. “To deal with it would mean the British government would have to consider what the problems are—”

“In a different way,” Ó Cairealláin said.

“It’s the post-colonial stress disorder,” Ó Dochartaigh said.

It is not true, on the other hand, that Ó Hannaidh, upon being arrested for drug use, refused to speak to the authorities without an Irish-speaking translator. In fact, the detained Irish speaker was a friend of Ó Hannaidh’s. But all three Kneecap members have been involved in the Irish-language-rights movement that, in 2022, resulted in the British Parliament making Irish a legal language in Northern Ireland. In the film, Ó Cairealláin’s father, played by Michael Fassbinder, is an I.R.A. soldier in hiding; in real life, the elder Ó Cairealláin is a language-revival star. He helped found Lá—the first Irish-language daily newspaper in Belfast—as well as the Irish cultural center An Chultúrlann and Raidió Fáilte, which broadcasts the elder Ó Cairealláin’s weekly Elvis Presley show. “Yeah, so all the bits in between the songs—that’s all in Irish, and it’s very funny,” Ó Dochartaigh said.

On the train, the three talked about visiting America. “There was a girl in San Francisco, and she knew all the words to what we were singing,” Ó Cairealláin said, “but when we spoke to her in Irish she didn’t know what we were saying.” They cancelled a trip to Austin last spring, in protest of weapons manufacturers that were sponsoring SXSW, but drove a Land Rover painted to resemble a Northern Irish police van to Utah for Sundance, to the chagrin of the Park City police. “They told us to get out of town,” Ó Hannaidh said.

Near the Meadowlands, the views of swamps recalled “The Sopranos”—“He’s a big fan,” Ó Dochartaigh said, of Ó Cairealláin—as well as Manchán Magan, an Irish-language activist featured on “Drug Dealin Pagans,” a track on their new album. Magan is the author of “Thirty-Two Words for Field,” a book about the Irish language and landscape. “If you lose the language of a place, you lose everything that goes with that,” Ó Dochartaigh said. “Belfast is Béal Feirste. It means ‘the mouth of the River Farset,’ so it tells ye the geography of the area.”

The train descended into the Hudson River tunnels, and the musicians reached for their luggage. “Basically, we’re just trying to give the diaspora something besides leprechauns to think about,” Ó Dochartaigh said. ♦