Róisín Murphy is a truer Irish rebel than Kneecap will ever be

It’s amazing what is considered a moral stain these days. When Róisín Murphy released her sublime album, Hit Parade, in 2023, a snotty hack at the Guardian called it a ‘masterful album with an ugly stain’. That ‘stain’ was Murphy’s expression of misgivings about pumping ‘mixed-up kids’ with puberty blockers. Like some pointy-hatted prick of the Middle Ages, the Guardian’s preening copyist decreed that Murphy’s art was now ‘collateral damage’ of her sinful beliefs. To the righteous, said the Guardian, this album will feel ‘dead on arrival’.

Fast forward to last week and the Guardian’s rave review of Kneecap’s new album, Fenian. It’s ‘terrific’, ‘triumphant’ and ‘tortured’, gushed the reviewer over every posh Brit’s favourite Provo-chic arseholes. No ‘ugly stains’ on Fenian, then? How about Kneecap’s cry of ‘Up Hamas’, the army of anti-Semites that slaughtered more Jews in one day than anyone else has since the Nazis? How about their posing with a book of speeches by the late Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah, in which he calls Jews ‘apes and pigs’? None of that ‘jars’ with Kneecap’s art, as we were told Murphy’s qualms about puberty blockers did with hers?

There you have it. In the moral universe of the Guardianista, it is a greater heresy to question Big Pharma’s drugging of gay kids than it is to smirk over the mass murder of Jews. It is a blacker stain against your soul to defend confused children from the medical experiments of ideologically captured doctors than it is to wave the flag of a virulently racist army (Hezbollah) that longs to excise the ‘cancerous’ Jews from the Holy Land and make them fuck off back to ‘Germany, or wherever they come from’. Defend children and they’ll damn you; flirt with fascism and they’ll love you.

Events last week laid bare the warped faux-morality of the keffiyeh classes. Two Irish artists made rebellious statements. First up was Ms Murphy, the former frontwoman of Moloko and now undisputed queen of electro-pop. She gave a stirring, tremulous speech at the parliamentary launch of the new report from Freedom in the Arts: The New Boycott Crisis. She recalled the totality and the wickedness of her cancellation in the wake of her puberty-blocker comments. ‘Being cancelled is hard’, she said. ‘The world goes very dark very quickly.’

Then came Kneecap. Their new album, Fenian, is rebellion by numbers. It features on its cover that gurning, almost 40-year-old former schoolteacher who wears a tricolor tea-cosy. The lyrics are squarely aimed at titillating the Fisher-Price radicals of the British / Irish bourgeoisie. ‘History will remember you pieces of shit and you’ll never be forgiven’, they rap about the Western facilitators of Israel’s ‘genocide’. Oh great, all summer such asinine doggerel is going to be chanted by sweaty mobs of gilded malcontents who mistake hating Israel and splitting the G on their Guinness for having a personality.

Guess which of these ‘Irish rebels’ was fawned over in the liberal press? Yep, Kneecap. Murphy’s fearless manifesto for artistic freedom and women’s rights was studiously ignored by the Guardian and the Irish Times. RTÉ seemed staggeringly disinterested in this Irish woman making waves in the UK with her plea for tolerance. But they all lapped up Kneecap’s toytown Brit-bashing and Israel-hate. RTÉ – Ireland’s state broadcaster – gushed over their ‘gangster rap menace’ and ‘Eminem skittishness’ and ‘Beastie Boys gobbiness’. If there was an award for physical cringing, I would win it.

The reason the regime stenographers of the liberal press love Kneecap and balk at Murphy is because Kneecap says what they want to hear and Murphy does not. Kneecap has not once voiced an opinion that wouldn’t win instant, giddy applause in every poncy eatery in Dalston. Hating Israel is all but mandatory in the keffiyeh-smothered cultural establishments of London and Dublin. As for their ‘snarling lyrical take-down’ of Keir Starmer – even Prospect, the most milquetoast magazine on these isles, is Starmer-sceptical these days. Murphy, however, with that heartfelt, private Facebook post in 2023, did something dangerous: she punctured the moral pretensions of the establishment, pulling back the curtain to reveal the clinical barbarism behind their sainted gender ideology.

The difference between Kneecap and Murphy is a true tale of our times. Their rebellious brand is polished and profitable. It is Guardian-approved. They throw lyrical petrol bombs at predictable targets from the safety of their RTÉ-fortified cultural bunker. They crave rebel status, and are gifted it by the trust-fund insurgency that passes for ‘the left’ in Britain and Ireland these days. Murphy, meanwhile, is a wholly reluctant rebel. She’s an accidental activist, as she said in her speech last week. She said what she said about puberty-blockers not for attention, not for star status, but because she truly believes it. She was compelled by the dictates of her own conscience to voice the unvoiceable: that drugging children in the service of ideology is an abomination.

She suffered for her beliefs. Gigs were cancelled, friendships withdrawn, insults issued. She was cast into ‘professional exile’. She experienced what Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie referred to as the ‘unconscionable barbarism’ of cancel culture. ‘We are no longer human beings. We are now angels jostling to out-angel one another. God help us. It is obscene’, wrote Adichie. It is. When all is said and done, it is the cruelty of cancel culture that startles. Murphy’s firm, calm pushback against this cultural sadism, this unforgiving unpersoning of dissidents, is worth a million Kneecap albums.

There’s an undeniable streak of misogyny in the differential treatment of Kneecap and Murphy. They’re cocky young lads with grins ‘like a smiley shark’ (!) and an ‘up-for-it charm’, so they can say whatever the fuck they like, even if it’s ‘Up Hamas’ – ie, up the rapists and murderers of Jews. Murphy, on the other hand, is just a middle-aged disco queen, so she needs to shut her mouth. Who does this hag think she is – that was the tenor of so much of the rainbow-hued invective that came her way when she dared to say children should be protected and women should not be insulted. ‘Stick to singing, love’ was the undertone of that ‘queer’ digital rage.

Anti-Semitism is at play, too. Kneecap can be forgiven because it was ‘only Jews’ who were insulted by their yelping of ‘Up!’ about the fascist armies that slay Israelis. Indeed, the new Freedom in the Arts report finds that alongside gender-critical women, Jewish creatives, too, suffer an extraordinary amount of the unconscionable barbarism of cancel culture that has infected even the arts world. Addled by the sexist cult of transgenderism and the anti-Semitic cult of Israelophobia, the cultural elite has become pathologically nonchalant about the liberty and safety of women and Jews. It is obscene.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy.