Kneecap: Why the Irish Left Will Regret Legitimising Ethno-Nationalism 

The Northern Troubles famously originated in a Civil Rights movement that went off the rails and ignited a sectarian timebomb primed since partition.

An attempt to import MLK-style civil agitation into the six counties kicked the canister onto a society already on edge, exploding into a potpourri of paramilitarism and a MI5-backed strategy of tension that only properly calmed well into the 2000s.

Naively buying into the American media crafted narrative that the black civil rights movement was a peaceful march through the institutions rather than an federal backed assault on Southerners and northern white proles in particular, an alliance of Marxists, democrats and republicans assumed that they could recreate the spirit of Birmingham, Alabama in Ulster.

The fact that the old Stormont administration was tired, defunct and on the way out regardless of the events at Burntollet Bridge is a given. The northern statelet was, is and will continue to be a basketcase regardless of whatever gleam is put onto it.

What is noticeable however reading the accounts in retrospect is how Irish civil rights leadership bought into the narrative put out by the American press and their political equivalents that the racial turmoil across the Atlantic was peaceful.

America in 1968 was in many respects a society flirting with civil war and in another timeline would have followed the North into the abyss. Imagine the Black Panthers times ten facing off against Southern Dixiecrats and assorted white defensive militias as a fractured U.S government and its security apparatus managed the mess.

Newark, Detroit, Harlem and then the aftermath of the MLK assassination in the late 1960s were all reminiscent of the scenes that would befall the North of Ireland a few years later.

A confluence of anti-Vietnam agitation, a collapsing Great Society programme, racial animosity and a post-WW2 youth bulge contributed to a violent conflagration that in another scenario could have sent American urban zones and the South into Nordie-style bloodshed for a generation.

While civil rights activists like Devlin and McCann aspired to capture the energy of the American movement, in actual fact working-class whites were in the same position as northern Catholics through tacit discrimination such as federal tactics like bussing as well as engineered race riots that saw them displaced and fleeing to the newly constructed suburbs. 

At home, very soon the Northern Civil Rights movement ran into a wall of sectarian violence that brought the Stormont regime toppling down as paramilitary warlords entered the void left by a political space meant to be claimed by a post-national movement for social equality.

Many on the left of Irish politics never forgave Irish republicanism carrying with them well into the 21st century a rabid hatred for the Provisional movement and nordies by extension which they viewed as ethno-sectarian bombthrowers, seeing even the residual constitutional nationalism of the Republic a tripwire for a type of green fascism to spread.

‘(Irish republicanism) is suffused with romanticism, which in politics tends in the direction of fascism,’ wrote Conor Cruise O’Brien with the then left-leaning republican movement splitting into militarist versus anti-militarist factions over how to respond to the failure of the civil rights movement.

Contrary the simplistic views of many contemporary Irish leftists (and many sincere right-wing nationalists), the Troubles was not a political nirvana but a gruelling slog of a conflict, managed by the spooks towards the end and one which any sane person was glad to see finished even if the peace accords tied Ireland 32 to globalism.

The Workers’ Party and various left tendencies observed a price to pay for paying continued homage to the national question as the republican struggle branched into sectarian warfare arguably scuppering the transition of the North and South into a normal social democratic state along the European or British model.

A decade after the Good Friday Agreement, buoyed on by Brexit era anglophobia and a robust Provisional cultural machine that spanned into the imaginations of Irish-American physical force, republicanism became cool again for a generation of Irish people.

The Provisional movement notwithstanding was a self-identifying ‘left’ or national liberation movement–increasingly so into the 1980s albeit with reactionary/Guevarist quirks and a national mission that trounced any economic agenda. 

Notwithstanding this some of the greatest ideological foes of the Provos were on the left and liberal centre who saw within the gangs of balaclava-clad men and hoodlum energy that the movement subsisted on as the seedlings for disorder and a quasi-fascist state.

By the year 2025 it can be said that the ‘RA and Sinn Féin had become cool again at least for the under 40s. The rationale beyond the Cruiser’s cultural purge against Irish separatism even extending to republican music seems justified in light of the normalisation of SF through millennial and Gen Z eyes, 

Like 1798 and the Young Irelanders before them the Provisional IRA has won a post-conflict cultural legitimisation thanks to the green flag and there is nothing Ruth Dudley Edwards and the southern establishment can do about it.

No greater testament to this can be found than the hip-hop trio Kneecap and their successful fusion of an teanga dhúchais and rap. A century of state-mandated classes and a sterile deontas-focused civil society ecosystem has been trounced by a vibrant Irish language movement north of the border spearheaded by the three lads.

Coming at a time of transition and preparation of an eventual Shared Ireland as well as the institutional success of northern nationalists against a moribund unionism Kneecap embodies a certain cultural movement that the north is at.

Even if eventually hammered by British spooks, sold out by Stakeknife and bought out by Clinton funny money the Provos have won the culture war as loyalism runs against the political rocks and fails to navigate the North’s new pluralistic reality. 

The question one must ask is can this genie of de facto legitimised ethno-nationalism be put back in the bottle ahead of replacement migration that the six counties have broadly missed out on? The geomagnetic reversal of the Dublin working-class the last two years in political terms over mass migration could just be an oeuvre ahead of what could be emerging from Belfast or Derry a decade hence.

For sure Kneecap, their dead end drug habits and Westminister approved pseudo-edginess are a containment zone for Irish nationalism but what happens if this spirit again slips the leash as happened in the civil rights era when Eamon McCann and company lost control of Nordie Catholics. 

If demographic trends are to be believed the Belfast and Derry Gen Zers chanting ‘Brits Out’ today will be facing migrant crime sprees now common across Europe and the Republic the next decade nevermind witnessing the same pattern of replacement migration.

Nationalism is a dionysian force in Ireland with the island at large not undergoing the same nationalism undergone by Europe post-1945. Even if rationalised through anti-zionism and republican socialism Irish people broadly speaking still think in tribal terms.

The ultimate lesson of Connolly as Sean O’Casey realised into turning away from left-republicanism is that nationalism can and will subsume egalitarian movements no matter the rhetoric.

Contrary the ideological cope of Marxists the British state, (Tory, Labour or otherwise) is as a golden rule “anti-racist” and committed to the displacement of the Irish as much as the English.

Kneecap may rightly be seen today by right-wing nationalists as the harbinger of cultural death and memeification, akin to the neutering of black liberation by hip hop and crack cocaine stateside. However, while far from our ideological port of call the duo have left the door just that bit open for the light to get in in the years hence.
Rather ironically, Let no man write Irish nationalism’s epitaph while Móglaí Bap is still breathing.