Driving up north recently, I passed a mural of Bobby Sands with his famous quotation: “Our revenge will be the laughter of our children.” And, reflecting on what kids find funny now, more than 40 years later, I wondered what he would have made of Kneecap.
He could hardly have imagined such a development, in fairness. Rap music as we know it today was still in its infancy when Sands died. Blondie had just introduced it into the pop mainstream in January 1981. The idea of the British hit parade ever featuring a band rapping in Irish was still in the realms of unwritten science fiction.
That the word Kneecap might one day acquire comedic value would itself have seemed far-fetched. But as he died so that future Irish children might laugh, Sands could not possibly have foreseen a world wherein young audiences, Irish and British alike, would be chuckling at a band of that name whose songs celebrate lifestyles of narcotic excess: one of the things the original, non-ironic kneecap was designed to discourage.
During his lifetime, it was still common for republicans and socialists to speak of the “imperialist yoke”, or the “yoke of oppression”. Today, the only “yokes” young people talk about are a collective term for certain psychoactive pills, including ecstasy.
Laughing for Ireland? Frank McNally on Bobby Sands and Kneecap
Faithful departure: Frank McNally on a belated first visit to Knock Airport, 40 years on
Joseph O’Connor on celebrating a Kerry priest who became a war-time hero
A rock in a hard place: Frank McNally hunts an elusive ancient monument in Mayo
Hence the Kneecap song Get Your Brits Out, which, if I understand the lyrics correctly, is a sort of cross-community appeal to various named members of the Democratic Unionist Party to forget politics and join the band in getting off their heads, viz: “And don’t be runnin’ round like silly old Tans/Just take these yokes and we’ll go for a dance/Go for a dance, go for a dance.”
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Yes, Bobby Sands would surely have approved of the band’s success in helping make Irish fashionable with the young. He might even have laughed along at the robust combination of Irish and Anglo-Saxon in such songs as C.E.A.R.T.A:
“Foc mí, ní fhaca mé na bastairdí/Carr dubh ina bhfolach ar ár mullach is iad taobh istigh/Seans ar bith, go bhfaighidh siad mo mhála MD,/Mar tá cóisir ann anocht ’s níl fáilte roimh an RUC.”
Still, we might have to break it to him gently that the surprise police raid described there is targeting the narrator’s bag of MDMA (“mhála MD”), another version of ecstasy on which our young heroes are getting wasted.
It’s true that Kneecap’s lyrics do sometimes also include cogent critiques of policing, pointing out ways in which it might be improved, as for example in the classic Your Sniffer Dogs Are Shite.
And yet, even there, the bottom line – literally – is also a celebration of drugs. The song ends on an ostensibly serious note, with the question: “All jokin’ aside lads, cá bhfuil an fucking snaois?” (I had to look up “snaois” in a glossary of Kneecap slang. It means “snuff”, although possibly not of the kind our ancestors would have put up their noses at wakes.)
Brave as they undoubtedly were, most of those who died for Ireland have left us limited guidance on the problem of how to live for it
The implication of Sands’s quotation is that life during the Troubles was too serious for laughter from the young. If so, the ceasefire babies of Kneecap are making up for it now, albeit in ways he might not have approved. But it’s to his credit, I suppose, that a man about to die for Ireland could have considered something as apparently frivolous as laughter to be central to his vision of the future.
This is rarely the case with martyred saints (of which, to republicans at least, Sands is certainly now one), who tend to set standards the rest of us can never match. This was the theme of an essay George Orwell wrote once, on Mahatma Gandhi, reflecting on the great Indian’s extremely ascetic life with some scepticism.
“Many people genuinely do not wish to be saints,” Orwell commented, adding drily, “and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings.”
Brave as they undoubtedly were, most of those who died for Ireland have left us limited guidance on the problem of how to live for it. Rude reality is rarely romantic. To the question “Was it for this (the sons of Róisín/Wild Geese/Lord Edward Fitzgerald, etc)?” the answer tends always to be no.
An exception was Éamon de Valera, who nearly died for Ireland but survived to reach 92, while embodying an austere way of living that fewer and fewer of his fellow citizens wished to emulate.
It’s just as well he didn’t live to hear what Kneecap are doing with his first official language; although, in fairness to de Valera, he did once pre-empt Bobby Sands in elevating the spirit of youthful comedy to a national aspiration.
Outlining his vision of an ideal Ireland in 1943, he included an image of laughing “maidens”. Unfortunately, this great moment was soon overshadowed by controversy. Ever since, there has been argument among historians – a humourless bunch – about whether the maidens in question were said to be “happy”, or “comely”, or both.
