Kneecap’s nauseating free-speech hypocrisy

So it seems Kneecap are in favour of censorship, after all. This week, the Irish rap trio led the charge to have Ireland’s Mise Éire festival banned on the grounds that it is ‘far right’. Post-punk band Fontaines DC and The IT Crowd actor Chris O’Dowd were among the other signatories of an open letter demanding the festival’s cancellation. The Mayflower Community Hall, in Drumshambo, County Leitrim has since caved in to the pressure, and announced that the event will no longer go ahead.

Other than celebrating ‘Irish culture, heritage and shared values’, it isn’t immediately obvious what makes the Mise Éire festival ‘far right’, as the letter alleges. A local news report describes the event’s organiser, Stephen Kerr, as an ‘anti-immigration activist’. Allegedly, a ‘far-right rally’ planned in Cork was cancelled to allow supporters to travel to the festival. Still, with just 400 tickets refunded, the festival wasn’t exactly going to rival a Nuremberg rally.

There are multiple layers of irony here, all of which seem to have been lost on Kneecap. One of the trio, rapper Mo Chara, was charged with a terror offence in the UK in June for allegedly unfurling the flag of a proscribed organisation – Hezbollah – at a gig in London back in November last year (he denies the charges). Kneecap have also courted controversy by chanting ‘Up Hamas, up Hezbollah!’. As a result, their concerts have been cancelled across the UK and Europe, allowing them to pose as martyrs of state repression.

Yet this time it was Kneecap leading the charge to have a music event cancelled. Perhaps their problem with the Mise Éire festival is not that it’s ‘far right’ as such, but that it’s the ‘wrong’ type of far right. After all, the Islamofascists of Hamas and Hezbollah stand for the extermination of Jews, the subjugation of women, the imprisonment (or death) of homosexuals and the establishment of theocratic rule.

Kneecap’s free-speech hypocrisy is nauseating. It’s been clear for some time that they’re about as radical as the middle-class students who warble along to their songs. Outing themselves as censorious scolds will no doubt endear them to their fanbase, but the rest of us can see right through the act.

Hugo Timms is an editorial assistant at spiked.