By Neil Scott
Watching Kneecap’s eloquent, beautiful short film, Irish Goodbye felt less like watching a music video and more like delving into my own grief and facing the void left by a parent’s death. Therapy, in a way. Seeing someone else’s grief, and understanding we aren’t alone.
As someone who grew up surrounded by steel walls and neighbourly distrust, with only a few patronisingly trite words of Irish but never fluency or real understanding, I know I’ve been a stranger to my own heritage. Seeing Naoise, Mo Chara, and DJ Próvaí turn our language (“our” because it is mine, but stolen violently from my great grandparents) into something that breathes, swears, and cries has helped me a lot. It has made me realise that the Irish language does not belong in a textbook or specialised programming on a state television or radio station that is “not for me.” It does not just belong to one perceived community in Ireland- It belongs in the streets, in the pubs, and in the quiet, heartbroken corners of our sitting rooms- all over the island, regardless of what your relationship- or lack of- to a god, a football team or passport might be.
The “habitus” of this film is so strikingly real it hurts. I looked at the houses and saw my own grandparents’ lace curtains. I looked at the streets and recognised the specific grey of a Belfast sky that looks the same in Down, Monaghan, Donegal, Dublin or Cork. There is a dignity in the working-class surroundings, the cluttered kitchen tables and the worn-out sofas, that usually gets mocked in the classist media. Here, it is treated with reverence as working class life should. It is the setting for our poetry.
When 2020 took my dad to Covid, the world felt as though it had been robbed of its logic. The world stopped in a way it never had before. It stopped within me, and in the lives of others as lockdowns and restrictions and fear stopped and warped time. There were no goodbyes, just a void where a giant of a man used to be. Watching Naoise process his mother’s suicide in this film, I felt that familiar ache of the lack of answers. While the weight of a parent taking their own life is a specific, heavy burden I cannot fully claim to know, that shared trauma of 2020 connects us. The film captures that “Irish Goodbye,” not the party trick of leaving a pub early, but the forced, sudden exit of someone you were not finished loving- and never will.
Naoise’s lyrics in this are pure, raw literature. Hearing the Irish language used to describe such modern, crushing pain makes me aware that I need to, regardless of how little I do, to reclaim some of the poetry denied to me by imperialism and the immersion into its lie by the community I grew up in.
“Níl mé ag iarraidh mórán, ach do ghlór a chloisteáil arís.”
(I don’t want much, just to hear your voice again.)
And about the permanence of loss:
“D’fhág tú poll i mo chroí nach líonfar go deo.”
(You left a hole in my heart that will never be filled.)
For centuries, we were told our language was the mark of the peasant, the “backward,” and the poor. To see Kneecap take that same language and use it to defend the vulnerable, the bullied, and the grieving is the ultimate act of rebellion. They are not just rappers. They are the modern-day filí (poets) of the working class- whether they like it or not, they are bringing communities together in the way Clannad, Stiff Little Fingers, Sinéad and aye, dare I say it- U2 – did in the eighties and nineties- and they are doing more. They are moving young people’s culture progressively towards reclaiming the positive soul of what it is to be working class and Irish.
They have proven that we are not just a post-conflict society, we are a people making a positive impact on the world. We have moved from surviving to storytelling. Kae Tempest’s London-born poetry weaving into Naoise’s Belfast Irish feels almost like a bridge being built over centuries of walls, ghettos, suspicion, distrust, persecution, murder and whispers.
I am introducing some Irish phrases to my vocabulary. I am doing it for me, but I am also doing it for my dad, my grandparents and Irish ancestors from across that beautiful, strange, positive and frustrating island and for every Irish person who was ever told their voice did not matter. I’ll probably never be able to have a conversation, but I’ll have regained words that describe my world as part of the world. “Tír gan teanga, tír gan anam” – “a country without a language is a country without a soul.”
