Get Your Brits Out

The North of Ireland (a.k.a. Northern Ireland, hereafter the North) is in the midst of a pop-culture renaissance driven by a new generation of artists who are rethinking the sectarian conflict of the late twentieth century (the Troubles) and their political aftermath. Perhaps the best known of these efforts is the 2018–22 sitcom Derry Girls (created by Lisa McGee), a series set in the years immediately preceding the Good Friday peace accord, which ended the Irish Republican Army’s (IRA) armed struggle against the British state and initiated a new political and economic relationship. From the Irish perspective, under the new arrangement, the Republic of Ireland could be seamlessly connected with the North of Ireland, and the border, along with its sandbags, machine guns, and checkpoints, could disappear. At the same time, from a British perspective, Northern Ireland (the exact same territory) could remain inside the United Kingdom. The central theme of Derry Girls was that, underneath the violence and sectarian divisions, private life still existed, and young people still experienced all the usual struggles and rites of passage. At times, the political situation is portrayed as inescapable, and at other times it merely serves as background noise for teen angst or the daily commute.Two other accounts of life in the North present a very different picture of the relationship between sectarian conflict and private life. The first, Anna Burns’s Milkman (2018), is a novel set during the troubles that illustrates the intrusion of sectarian violence and the accompanying surveillance into every aspect of daily life. The second, the film Kneecap, is set in present-day Belfast, where the promise of the Good Friday agreement has already encountered the stark reality of sectarian politics and economics. While Derry Girls and Milkman highlight the struggle to carve out a private space in the face of ever-present political pressures, Kneecap throws the politicization of daily life back in the teeth of the British establishment, unionist politicians, and republicans who would use the sectarian conflict as a pretext to reinforce their own conservative agenda. The fact that Kneecap contests the status quo through the Irish language is a challenge to conservative elites across the whole of Ireland.Milkman provides a useful foil to understand Kneecap. The novel is told entirely through the language of social position. It contains no proper names to speak of, and the central characters are identified solely by their relationship to the protagonist-narrator or their position in the wider society. One exception is Milkman, whose name, we are led to believe, is a code name for a paramilitary operative of high standing among those who renounce the British state. The story revolves around the efforts of Milkman, a powerful middle-aged man, to subtly pressure the narrator, a young woman, into a sexual relationship. He is aided in this by his own extensive surveillance resources. His machinations also draw the attention of the British surveillance apparatus to the narrator. In addition to this, the community itself is locked in a constant exercise of self-examination, ever vigilant to see if any member of the community is questioning the political and religious sensibilities of their own sect.In much the same way that Hannah Arendt (1976: 20) famously observed that in a totalitarian state, even a chess club not affiliated with the ruling party could be seen as subversive, Milkman demonstrates that sectarian civil conflict can have its own totalizing effects. That is to say that political interpretation of sectarian conflict comes to permeate and define every aspect of daily life. Under such conditions, any number of activities are likely to draw the attention of the warring factions or their self-policing communities: reading while walking, walking in the wrong place, using basic services of the state, cooking (if identified as male), owning parts from the wrong car, or reading the wrong books. Anything that is odd could be suspect, and anything that is suspect could draw surveillance and perhaps violence. Under these conditions, the trauma and strain of the conflict reach far beyond the violence, and trauma and strain take a toll on various characters that sometimes results in violence but at other times in a tendency to withdraw and shut down, to be hemmed in on all sides. This is particularly true for the narrator and for women in general in the story, but, in joining together, the women of the community are also shown to have the potential to push back against the totalizing nature of the conflict. Men, on the other hand, particularly the wrong sort of men, those who cook and watch sunsets, are expected to hide beneath a veneer of implicitly toxic masculinity.Taken at face value, the movie Kneecap is a chaotic but comic tale of sex, drugs, and rap, set against the backdrop of the post-peace-accord era in the North. For a general audience with little knowledge of the region’s history, it would be easy to see the political content as a gimmick, but this would be a mistake.Unlike the mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap (1984), Kneecap is not about a fictional band. Kneecap came to the attention of those outside of Belfast in 2017 with their single “C.E.A.R.T.A” (“rights” in Irish), which highlighted the struggle for Irish language rights in the North. The band soon attracted the attention of younger Irish speakers and those looking for more modern expressions of the Irish language across Ireland and beyond. The band’s unapologetically republican stance and their lyrics employing obscenities and lines about sex and drug use drew the ire of conservative protestant politicians, particularly the conservative Democratic Unionist Party (DUP). Kneecap responded to these critics in their song “Get Your Brits Out” (2019), which depicted DUP leaders Jeffrey Donaldson and Arlene Foster going on a wild, drug-fueled night out with the band in lyrics that freely intersperse drug use, sexual innuendo, English, and Irish (“Bhían DUP harassing me”). The triple entendre of the song’s title suggests the obvious sexual reference, an anti-British political message, and that what the DUP really needs is a good night out and the right combination of dancing and drugs.Yet, in ridiculing the DUP, Kneecap is saying out loud what any observer of British politics already knows—the DUP failed spectacularly at political brinksmanship, largely because they are in denial about the political and economic reality that surrounds them. While the North as a whole voted to stay within the EU, the DUP sought to use Brexit as a time machine that would allow them to go back to the Ulster of the past, with a hard border between the North and the South alongside protestant political and economic supremacy. In this, the DUP crystalized for all to see the underlying psychological pathology that makes a soft landing so difficult for any declining empire—the tendency to attempt time travel through political action. This was a central feature of much of the Brexit propaganda across the UK. Here, time travel is not a metaphor—such political actors literally fail to understand the functioning of time and the fact that time affects other places that are interconnected with one’s own. The notion that, by reverting to an earlier political domestic arrangement, a nation (or part of a nation) can resume its former place in the world betrays a very poor understanding not only of global systems but also of the unidirectional movement of time.From one perspective, as a happy accident of the larger Brexit debacle, Northern Ireland remains functionally both in the EU and the UK, making it an attractive place for businesses to locate, and the area has outperformed other parts of the UK during the post-COVID-19/Brexit economic recovery. In the hands of less intransigent political actors, this fact would form the basis for a potent argument to preserve the status quo and forestall any talk of Irish reunification. But the DUP does not seem to be a competent party or have any idea of how to become one. This is no accident. The party is a settler-colonialist anachronism at the heart of a dying empire that, paradoxically, none of the English opportunists who promoted Brexit would ever take seriously.The DUP also failed to see the shifting political winds that saw the Irish community demanding official recognition of the Irish language. In a modern world where the death of any language is viewed as a loss, it is no longer really possible to demand the abandonment of an indigenous language indefinitely. The larger British establishment had already figured out that snuffing out minority languages was a losing proposition, politically speaking, and had previously extended language rights to Gaelic (the Scottish cousin of Irish) and Welsh. The DUP was unconvinced but also wildly out of step with the times.The British had discovered that Irish was difficult to kill, and the government of the Republic of Ireland had its own problems keeping the language alive. While Kneecap’s music was exciting to Irish speakers and those who aspire to be, the Irish establishment, charged with promoting the language, was not as enthusiastic. Kneecap has been critical of these conservative forces within Irish society, notably Raidió Teilifís Éireann (RTÉ), which banned their music from RTÉ stations, and the self-proclaimed remnants of the Irish Republican Army, which objected to their open acknowledgement (and even promotion) of drug use. While RTÉ was let off comparatively lightly with an exhortation in the 2018 song “Incognito” to not listen to RTÉ, republican militants got harsher treatment, with band member DJ Próvaí shooting RA-men (IRA men) from a tandem bicycle in “Gael-Gigolos.” More than musicians, Kneecap established themselves as wind-up artists, drawing fire from political actors and then escalating the satire.The film Kneecap continues this rejection of conservative politics from both sides while calling for a unified Ireland, but it’s also about unity between the Catholic/Irish and Protestant/British communities and the context in which that unity is already happening. Drug use, sex, dancing, illegal parties, and throwing rocks at the peelers (police) are all portrayed in the film and in Kneecap’s music as possible cross-community activities. Meanwhile, the central sexual/romantic relationship of the film involves a cross-community coupling that draws in themes of generational trauma, sectarian ideology, sadomasochism, and, ultimately, love. Kneecap endorses the traditional republican line “Brits Out,” which band member Mo Chara explains does not mean the Protestants who identify as British, but the institutions of the British state. When pressed by his Unionist love interest as to why the song doesn’t say all that, he points out that a song chorus is not the 1916 declaration.Kneecap is an explicitly political film that eschews all of the traditional modes of respectable politics and respectability more generally. Ultimately, this makes sense because it was the areas of respectable life that were most permeated by the totalizing effects of sectarian conflict. The political leftovers of that conflict, whether in the form of DUP’s homophobia and racism or in the form of self-appointed guardians of morality within the Republican community, fail to respond to the needs of modern society and leave the “immoral” or the criminal as the only grounds for rebellion. In this, the Irish language occupies a curious position and has lived a double life on the two sides of the Irish border. In the South, on the heels of British attempts to eradicate the language, the new Irish government of the early twentieth century set about implementing a revival program that would restore and elevate the language. Irish would no longer be the language of poverty and backwardness, as the British and many Irish people themselves had come to see it. Instead, Irish would be the language of the erudite, of long-established poetic tradition—a respectable language. It seemed to some that these efforts at revival might be the very thing to suffocate the language, succeeding where the British had failed. The film takes aim at the way Irish is taught and the absurdity of teaching modern urban youth how to talk about cutting sod in the rain. In the North, Irish had become a symbol of resistance. The protagonists learn their Irish from an Irish speaker who acquired the language in jail as a political prisoner.Thus, on one side of the border, Irish was highly respectable but in danger of falling into a coma, while on the other side it was viewed as dangerous and controversial by the dominant (British) political elites. In choosing to launch an attack on the status quo in the North through the medium of Irish, Kneecap reclaims the most central and sacred element of Irish culture and weaponizes it to attack the self-appointed guardians of morality on all sides. Their target is never, however, the people of the North on either side of the sectarian divide. They do seek a unified Ireland, and they do not want anyone to forget the past, but they envision a new life for the North, characterized by freedom rather than a sectarian conflict and a surveillance state intruding into every aspect of daily life. The central message of Kneecap is one of reconciliation for the whole of the North of Ireland, Unionist and Republican, a message that challenges the legitimacy of the self-serving political remnants of sectarian conflict.This call for unity is more than political expediency. Kneecap has an undercurrent of tenderness that appears in the relationship between the childhood friends who form the core of the group, Móglaí Bap and Mo Chara, and later extends to their reluctant bandmate, DJ Próvaí. There is no toxic masculinity here. This tenderness also appears in Móglaí Bap’s relationship with his shut-in mother, who, like the women in Milkman, finds herself a prisoner of the sectarian conflict in her own home. Yet, in the end, she finds strength in her community, and the film ends with her surrounded by friends and singing in Irish. Ultimately, Kneecap rejects the weaponization of Irish and points instead to its power to heal, to make whole. This whole includes the people of the protestant community as well—a community that Kneecap knows and respects, even as they wind up the DUP.