Rebel Music - Kneecap and Gaza

The Irish Passport

Society & Culture

4.8 • 652 Ratings

🗓️ 5 July 2025

⏱️ 60 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

An Irish language rap group has improbably enough become the focus of global media attention and political debate. Why? For describing Israel's actions in Gaza as a genocide and accusing the United States of complicity before an approving crowd at the music festival Coachella. In this episode, Naomi and Tim explain the origins of Kneecap in the movement for Irish language rights, the controversies about the band as its fame grew to ever greater heights, and why it now appears to be becoming a test case for the freedom of cultural figures to speak out about Palestine. A new bonus episode in which Naomi and Tim take questions from listeners about the Irish language and generational trauma is available on patreon.com/theirishpassport You can also listen to our 2020 Halfpint about Kneecap and the politicisation of the Irish language here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/34241066

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, welcome to Irish Passport.
0:02.3	Let's do it.
0:03.1	Welcome to the Irish Passport.
0:04.8	I'm Tim McInerney.
0:06.0	I'm Naomi O'Leary.
0:07.0	We're friends.
0:07.7	Can you both to Naomi?
0:08.5	Anwar Fat, Tim.
0:09.9	This is your passport to Irish culture, history and politics.
0:13.2	Uh-huh.
0:13.5	I'm recording.
0:14.2	One, two, two, three.
0:16.6	Okay.
0:56.1	Hello everyone and welcome back to the Irish Passport podcast and today we're talking about something that I think most of you will have heard about in the last few months and especially since the iconic Coachella music festival in the States. We are talking of course about kneecap, the Irish hip-hop group who have made headlines pretty much one after another for the last few months, right, Naomi?
0:59.4	That's right.
1:00.3	Yeah, they've become sort of, I think, internationally emblematic of the Irish position,
1:06.0	the Irish public sympathy for the Palestinian side, I suppose, in the current situation in Gaza.
1:13.3	It's interesting to see how this is a band that controversy has accompanied since their inception, as we'll see in this episode.
1:22.2	But now it's become a global issue with massive headlines in the US, the British Prime Minister making statements
1:29.2	about it, bizarrely enough, it's full of interesting political overtones, which we're going to
1:35.1	go through in this episode and also check in about what is the situation in Gaza at the moment.
1:40.3	It's an interesting one because we've actually covered kneecap before. We covered kneecap in a half pint
	...

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