‘Your sniffer dogs are shite’? The future wasn’t supposed to sound like this

On Kneecap and the eternal battle for Belfast

‘Money's no more stress, buíochas le G4S
Tá ár bhfiacla ar fad íoctha, now it's time to invest, huh?
Nah, I'm giving half to me ma
Some blood money for my honeys
And the rest to the Ra’

A few years ago, there was a mural painted in the Holyland area of Belfast in honour of north Down golfer Rory McIlroy.

The Holyland houses students and, increasingly, migrant families, packed tight into terraced houses converted into ‘multiple occupancy’ dwellings.  

“It was the intention of the mural of Rory to send out a positive message that if you work hard enough at what you do, you can achieve your goals,” said the landlord Declan Boyle, who commissioned the work for the gable wall of one of his properties.

Boyle owns at least 31 houses in the south Belfast neighbourhood, it could be more than 50, more than 100 even, but when a journalist recently asked him for an exact figure, the former city councillor told them it was none of their business. The going rate for a Boyle terrace house is about £1,500 a month.

The local media lapped the mural up when it was painted back in 2012. This was to be the New Belfast, city on a hill, capital of the New Northern Ireland. Murals of men in balaclavas could be replaced with those of millionaire celebrities. Our face was washed for the world and our manky yellow teeth bleached white for the bright new day.

The future was going to look like a golf course, it was going to taste of lightly peppered smashed avocado, it was going to smell like the bleached bogs of a new office block and it was going to sound like Snow Patrol.

The band from Bangor’s 2008 release Take Back the City was about their love for Belfast, lead singer Gary Lightbody explained. The band love Belfast so much that they filmed the video for the track in London. But that wasn’t necessarily contradictory - the song is a gift for tourist boards anywhere, giving them music to go with their promotional videos for their regenerated linen/dock/factory/homeless zones. Listening to it or watching the video, Take Back the City doesn’t allow you to fix yourself in a place, it’s like you’re on the moving walkway in an airport, watching the destinations from airline ads float past you on the wall. All that is solid melts into air.

But Belfast, you old bitch. While the city still had its problems, it was a "fully functional, vibrant, European city these days,” said Lightbody in one interview from the time. Who says something like that? That the place they love is “fully functional”?’ What does that even mean?

It was Northern Ireland PLC speak at its peak. The call centres are booming, every landlord’s box room is getting top notch rates and, here, we even have a wee bit of edginess left if you fancy a weekend break with a difference. “You can sing 'til you drop… 'Cause the fun just never stops”.

This was music that the upwardly mobile could listen to while they were working for their landlord’s holiday money, and their landlord could listen to it too on one of their city breaks,  because there was no was hint of tension in it, no friction, less contradiction. It was about a nowhere place, an anywhere space, filmed in a dockyard about to be recommissioned as condos for stock market staff.

John Lennon and Paul McCartney had warned about this death of connection way back in 1965 when they wrote Nowhere Man… “He's a real nowhere man… Sitting in his nowhere land… Doesn't have a point of view”.

Which kind of brings me to what I had originally sat down to write about. The hip hop group Kneecap played Féile an Phobail in west Belfast’s Falls Park for the second year running on Friday night.  

When they played last year, unveiling a mural of a police jeep on fire on their roundabout way to the stage, the official representatives of Northern Ireland PLC weren’t best pleased. Doug Beattie, leader of the Unionist party that ran a one-party state for 50 years, accused the band of “grooming a new generation of young people with insidious messaging”.

Out of work justice minister Naomi Long couldn’t even bring her respectable self to utter the group’s name, calling them “the band in question”. “Young children” had been “groomed into sectarian hatred” just by listening to or being in the company of Kneecap, Long alleged.  

Again, who talks like this? ‘Insidious messaging’? ‘Band in question’? It’s the language of the insincere, fighting hard to keep out of the sentence what it is they really want to say. But if they were sincere with their words for just a minute, what would it sound like? Kneecap think they know… “I’m a H. Double O. D… Low life scum, that’s what they say about me”.

The ‘band in question’, who switch from Irish to English throughout their songs, are inspired by, among others, NWA. Seven words from NWA’s Fuck tha Police – “cause my identity by itself causes violence” – run through Kneecap’s work, but it is work that is laced with that most effective, dangerous of things, applying their inspirations solidly to their own time and place… “C.E.A.R.T.A, is cuma liom sa foc faoi aon garda, dúidín lásta, tá mise ró-ghasta, ní fheicfidh tú mise i mo sheasamh ró fháda.”

Some people, like the former justice minister, hate the name ‘Kneecap’, it riles and annoys, but then those it riles don’t seem to get that the characters depicted in their lyrics would have been as likely to have been on the end of an IRA punishment shooting as to have been part of the IRA. The realities of working-class life don’t often allow for such clear-cut distinctions.

They shapeshift with perverted pleasure from protest to hedonism, back and forth, making one out of the other, their lyrics mercilessly cutting open the puritan streak in Irish republicanism as much as they do the cheap moralism in their conservative and liberal critics. They can take the stinking machismo laden English hooligan chant of ‘Get your tits out for the lads’ and turn it into a slogan that tens of millions of people around the world, from India to Kenya to the Falls Park can identify with in Get your Brits out.

They take the language of authority and officialdom and turn it inside out, use it against itself, allowing their largely young and working-class audiences to get a grip on an environment that was shaped in spite of them, “An bhfuil aon rud mídhleathach ort? I won't say it again, Má fhaighimid rud éigin, there's things that you'll have to explain."

There was a crinkle in the air when they sang in west Belfast last night, a fission running from the stage to the crowd and back again. If you want to be all Joyceian about it, you could even say this fission was running into the two graveyards that abut the Falls Park and coming back in full of poweful charge. Whatever about that, they got each other, these fenians on the stage and those below them on the grass.

I stood at the back of the crowd, trying to spy my own daughter revelling among her cairde and pobal, drinking deep the reassurance that this is after all her time and her place, shapeshifting through languages and accents and meanings, but keeping them solid for all that, laughing in the face of nowhere men everywhere, gilding herself against the world of call centres and landlords and bourgeois frowns.

There’s a scene at the end of Gillo Pontecorvo’s epic story of the Algerian independence struggle, The Battle of Algiers, where the armed conspirators have been mopped up and neutralised, “now the tapeworm’s headless”, remarks a sophisticated French general while lazily drawing on a celebratory cigarette.  But alas, a couple of years later, from out of the ghettos, “no one knows why” relays a confused journalist back to Paris, come civilians in their thousands, chanting in Arabic, attempting to overrun the European quarter without a single weapon; night after night, the Kasbah echoes “with those strange cries, rhythmic, nightmarish” as the centre lost faith in its ability to hold things together.

In the Belfast that came after the armed conspiracy, there was supposed to be endless call centre jobs and hotel work and loads of balls talked about the Titanic. The dangerous energy of a people in struggle was to be boxed up and put on a museum shelf, to be viewed dimly through protective glass not deemed safe for leaning upon.

Maybe that’s the fear Kneecap are tapping into, that the protective glass might be cracking. Maybe in the dead of night in north Down, on Malone and Cyprus Avenue, there are people of means tossing and turning, listening for the step of Nike-clad feet, alive for strange chants of ‘C.E.A.R.T.A’, the hissing, steadily rising whisper of a thousand stoned young fenians coming through their open windows on a balmy August night… ‘Your sniffer dogs are shite, your sniffer dogs are shite.’

God almighty, the future wasn’t supposed to sound like this, it was supposed to be squeaky clean, sanitised, free of uncomfortable meaning, written in the lingua franca of invisible power. But always, there are lowlifes conspiring and scribbling, dancing and loving, smoking and drinking and singing, forcing a future for their lowly kin into the night air.