Kneecap on politics, pressure and psychedelics: ‘Of course we need therapy ... for many long years’

The walls around Kneecap ’s part of west Belfast are coloured with history and culture. “Blessed are those who hunger for justice,” one roughly sprayed piece of graffiti declares. A mural of the boxer Michael Conlan covers a wall on Violet Street, off the Falls Road. Another, around the corner on Hawthorn Street, commemorates Mairéad Farrell, Seán Savage and Daniel McCann, the three IRA members killed by the SAS in Gibraltar in 1988. Opposite that is the well-known Kneecap mural depicting a burning police vehicle. Walking up the stairs of the Hawthorn Bar next door, pint of Guinness in hand, Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh asks the barman to bring more pints up in half an hour, and then another round half an hour after that. It’s a Monday lunchtime in a pub that is something of an unofficial base for Ó hAnnaidh, aka Mo Chara, and the rest of Kneecap. Hanging on the back wall downstairs is the sign that he pressed against a window to media below when the crown prosecution service’s appeal to retry a thrown-out case – the charge had been under the UK Terrorism Act, for allegedly displaying a Hizbullah flag – was rejected. The sign reads “I’m a free mawn” . Upstairs is a single small table painted with Kneecap’s logo. A week later the group will play an album launch at the Limelight – at 750 people, the Belfast venue has a capacity they have long graduated from – for their new record, Fenian . They’ll also be performing tracks from it when they headline this year’s All Together Now festival, in Co Waterford, as well as when they play at Crystal Palace Park, in London, at the Reading and Leeds festivals, and at Primavera, in Barcelona and Porto, among other dates this summer. Where’s left that they’d still like to play – their dream gig? “Slane”, Mo Chara and Naoise Ó Cairealláin, aka Móglaí Bap , both reply. There’s something primitive about being in a field, Móglaí Bap says. [ Kneecap: Fenian – Never mind the outrage, here’s the brilliantly catchy five-star album Opens in new window ] They’re speaking Irish, as they do throughout our time together. When The Irish Times has talked to Kneecap in the past, before the release of their first album and their fictionalised biopic , in 2024, or at the time of Mo Chara’s court appearances in the summer of 2025, it has been in English. Legal appeal: Kneecap supporters outside court in London in January. Photograph: Lucy North/PA Wire But they rap in Irish, and want to promote the language. So they asked for this interview to be as Gaeilge, and for an English translation to be available, rather than the other way around. Kneecap have had the kind of year that few artists will ever experience: huge crowds; cancelled concerts; international coverage when their stance on Palestine was seized upon following a performance at Coachella; interventions from prime ministers attempting to remove them from festival line-ups; court hearings; an entire area of Glastonbury shut down in the name of crowd control; sold-out arenas. A smattering of singles responded to events at the time, including The Recap, lambasting Kemi Badenoch, the leader of the British Conservative Party, and No Comment, reflecting the chaos and paranoia engulfing the group. Fenian is their second attempt at a second album: they recorded but then parked another. Produced by Dan Carey, who has also worked with Fontaines DC, Wet Leg and Geese, it’s both claustrophobic and expansive, aggressive but with moments of unexpected tenderness, foreboding yet energetic, more directly political and darker than the rollicking hedonism of their debut, Fine Art, which they released in 2024. Its tracks satirise the UK (An Ra), express transnational solidarity (Palestine), detail the darkness of the Troubles (Occupied 6: “Only bad news at home / Who was shot, was he known? / From the shop coming home / Another ma on her own”) and squirm in drug-induced insomnia (Cocaine Hill). “This album is a response to our year, the witch hunt, and all the other stuff,” Mo Chara says. Kneecap: Mo Chara, DJ Próvaí and Móglaí Bap. Photograph: Tom Beard Kneecap seem to have emerged from that year remarkably relaxed. JJ Ó Dochartaigh, aka DJ Próvaí , their balaclava-wearing DJ and hype man, is absent today. Yesterday, Viktor Orbán , who banned Kneecap from his country, lost Hungary’s general election after 20 years as prime minister. Móglaí Bap says that if Kneecap are Batman, Orbán is their Penguin. Last November, when the whistle blew after Troy Parrott’s hat-trick against Hungary, Kneecap posted on social media, “Stick that up your bollox Viktor Orbán.” Now there’s just the simple matter of border control. “Do you think we can go to Hungary now?” Mo Chara wonders. “I don’t think anyone can stop us getting the train to Hungary,” Móglaí Bap says, citing all the rail routes into the country. “Impossible to police,” Mo Chara decides. Most of Fenian came together in the studio, across sessions “split up with court”, he says. “For most groups, they’re able to go into the studio, draw the curtains, lock the door for a couple of weeks and make an album without having to go to the magistrate’s court, for f**k sake.” Yet “even though we thought that would be a hindrance, it ended up being the opposite”. Things are happening, you write about them When Carey attended a hearing with a protest outside, he recorded a “Free Mo Chara” chant that ended up on the track Carnival. Its hook is: “There’s a carnival coming to a town near you, / Kneecap versus the crown, so come here you, / step up and view their attraction, / circus of distractions, / away from their actions is where they will steer you.” Mo Chara developed the idea for the track while he was sitting in court, an experience that he says he found “hugely inspirational” creatively. Writing songs under such pressure was a choice. A lot of eyes were on them, Mo Chara says; had Kneecap disappeared, and tried to process what was happening out of the spotlight, they would have lost the moment. “It’s better to go with the current than against.” “Things are happening, you write about them,” Móglaí Bap adds. Over the year, Kneecap were becoming better known for their activism than for their music. But taking a stand is not unusual territory. “What some people consider a protest, my family would probably consider a party,” Móglaí Bap says. Fenian: Kneecap perform at 3Arena in Dublin in December 2025. Photograph: Chris Maddaloni He has an early memory of his father, the Irish-language activist Gearóid Ó Cairealláin , sticking Irish-language signs to bins. He died on the eve of one of Kneecap’s biggest concerts, at the SSE Arena in Belfast, in 2024. A year later his grandmother, whom he and Mo Chara lived with, died on the eve of their first show at 3Arena , in Dublin. As a teenager, Móglaí Bap went with his mother, Aoife Ní Riain, who died by suicide in 2020, to remove Israeli products from the shelves at a local Asda supermarket. On the album’s closing track, Irish Goodbye, he pays tribute to the beauty in the ordinariness of his relationship with her: going for walks, having lunch at a Clements coffee shop, holding her hand. [ A week with Kneecap: ‘Liam Óg doesn’t like much attention. This is quite a lot of heat for him’ Opens in new window ] The first street protest Mo Chara remembers attending was one around Irish language rights. As a youth worker he protested against budget cuts affecting services for young people. When Kneecap won their case against the British government for unlawfully blocking an arts-funding award, they donated the grant to two youth centres in Belfast: half to Glór na Móna , off the Springfield Road, and half to RCity , on the Shankill Road. On tour, Móglaí Bap often runs 10km in each city they’re playing, to raise money for emergency food parcels for Gaza. Thirty per cent of the profits from Kneecap’s jersey collaboration with Bohemians FC – their manager, Daniel Lambert , is chief commercial officer of the club – will go towards building a community music studio in the West Bank. With the pressure of “things happening” over the past year, they must have needed the support of therapy. “Of course,” Mo Chara says. Móglaí Bap nods: “For many long years.” Even so, how did they not lose their minds? “I lose my mind at least once a week. Just get on with it. I don’t believe anyone is fully keeping it together,” Móglaí Bap says. “White-knuckling for life,” Mo Chara adds. Móglaí Bap describes his approach: “Take some psilocybin, freak out for a while, start crying, and then you’re back up.” That, plus training – he’s a keen hurler – and really long baths. They also went to the small Japanese island of Miyako, to switch off. “There’s something attractive about the chaos as well,” Móglaí Bap says. Mo Chara is a little more tentative: “It can be.” “It’s very exciting, chaos,” Móglaí Bap says. “You can hold the flag next time,” Mo Chara jokes, deadpan. That’s the Hizbullah flag he allegedly held aloft at a gig in Kentish Town, in north London, in November 2024. He was also alleged to have said “Up Hamas! Up Hizbullah!” Kneecap performing during the 2025 Glastonbury Festival. Photograph: Yui Mok/PA UK law classes both as terrorist organisations, banning not just membership but also any type of backing, including “moral support or approval” . Given the atrocities that Hizbullah and Hamas have been responsible for, can expressing support for them ever be legitimate political speech? Mo Chara replies, politely, that he doesn’t want to be drawn into such a conversation and that all the group’s statements on the matter are already public. (“Let us be unequivocal,” they posted on social media in April 2025, “we do not, and have never, supported Hamas or Hezbollah. We condemn all attacks on civilians, always. It is never okay. We know this more than anyone, given our nation’s history.”) At the Coachella music festival, in California, in 2025 they projected the slogan “F**k Israel. Free Palestine” on to the stage backdrop. The crowd cheered, but the band believe the incident prompted a music-industry effort to ensure they faced consequences: the producer of their first album, Toddla T , called out “backdoor pressure” from a group of industry executives who allegedly wrote to Glastonbury seeking Kneecap’s removal from the festival line-up. (Multiple high-profile artists subsequently signed a letter in support of the group’s right to free expression.) Their Coachella performance also kept Kneecap in the spotlight of British authorities. On a visit to Belfast the day after the high court in London rejected the crown prosecution service’s appeal against the Hizbullah-flag decision, Keir Starmer , the British prime minister, told reporters: “My views on Kneecap are very well known in relation to what they stand for and what they say, which is completely intolerable.” (“F**k Keir Starmer, Netanyahu’s b**ch and genocide armer,” the group respond on Fenian, on the track Liars Tale.) People also dug through concert footage. “The only good Tory is a dead Tory. Kill your local MP,” one clip appeared to show a member of the group saying in November 2023. (The Metropolitan Police dropped its inquiry after counter-terrorism officers examined the smartphone video, as the alleged offences happened outside the statutory time limit for prosecution.) According to Kneecap, the remark about Conservative politicians was taken out of context as part of a broader smear campaign. Is that defence an attempt to avoid accountability for things they’ve said? “It’s to do with the context during a gig,” Mo Chara says. “If you clip a certain comedian, you can make them look like the worst person in the world when, in actual fact, people in the room recognise what they were getting at. “Maybe a performer is a little controversial, whatever it is: people know what they’re getting into if it’s a joke. We’re obviously not advocating murdering MPs.” You can’t start bombing people because you think they’re conservative — Móglaí Bap Móglaí Bap says: “There was some comedian who said they should bomb Glastonbury because Jeremy Corbyn was there. He’s not brought to court over something like that.” The live context, he adds, is about moments on stage within the broader concert, along with the way a remark is delivered. “These are all such important things. You might laugh at the delivery of a complete piss-take, but nobody leaves a gig [murderous]. The joke is lost when you’re not there.” The group’s name, which they regard as ironic, also offends some people. The historian Liam Kennedy has written that it trivialises “forms of repression within the Catholic nationalist areas under the brutal discipline of the Provisional IRA ”. “That’s it!” Mo Chara says. “He got it! He’s on to us.” Seriously, though: is there a point where irony crosses into the aestheticisation of atrocity? Most of Fenian came together in the studio, across sessions 'split up with court', says Mo Chara. Photograph: Tom Beard “Look,” Mo Chara says, “these topics have been out of bounds for many years. When people aren’t talking to each other, you fill that space with conflict. “I understand that people who are perhaps a little older and a wee bit closer to [the Troubles] would probably be sensitive to it. Fair enough. “What we’re doing with all of this craic is that we’re normalising the craic with it. There are lads the same age as me from the Shankill I would never have spoken to, because it would have been rare that I would have had a chance to speak with someone from that background. “But we’re at a point now, I hope, where we can take the p**s. And this is happening. Maybe people who are older don’t understand that. But there are young people taking the p**s out of each other with all of this craic, whereas at one point in their [older] generation that was violent. “For us, we’re all taking the p**s together. I think dialogue is extremely important. At the end of the day, just because you don’t like something, and you don’t understand it, doesn’t mean it’s always for you.” Móglaí Bap says: “I think a thing with academics is that they’re looking at things from the outside. But, on the inside, they don’t see that we’re talking with people, people like Young Spencer at gigs with us” – the unionist rapper has played as Kneecap’s support act – “or someone whose parents were maybe in the UDA”. [ Jessica Reynolds: ‘Being in the Kneecap film opened my eyes to my Irish identity’ Opens in new window ] Ordinary young people don’t think like history professors, he says. “It’s only academics, or certain people who have ideas about our music, thinking it’s going to cause division or barriers. In reality, that’s not what it’s like ... It also does a disservice to young people today. And [some] people misunderstand it on purpose to have outrage.” Mo Chara takes over: “I think it’s important to mention with a person like Young Spencer, I don’t agree with him and he doesn’t agree with me. I’m a republican and I suppose he’s a unionist. But he is being authentically himself, and I respect that. I respect him. He has this tune, P.R.O.D., and I love that. I think that’s unreal ... Young people are moving on.” “In republicanism,” Móglaí Bap says, “solidarity is important.” Working-class solidarity across identities and communities has always been a core message of Kneecap’s. As Mo Chara once put it: “I’ve more in common with f**king Joe Bloggs from the Shankill Road, who’s 23, than Sebastian Cockworth from Dublin, even though we’ve got the same passports. I’ve more in common with a working-class unionist than an upper-class Irish.” Kneecap say they want to respond to Leo Varadkar , who criticised them last month for travelling to Cuba as part of a humanitarian convoy to protest the embargo under which people of the island are suffering from shortages of food, medicine and fuel. The former taoiseach, who in the run-up to last year’s Glastonbury festival defended Kneecap’s right to be inappropriate, challenging and disruptive , posted on social media that, while the group were in the country, they should call for the “restoration of free speech, free assembly and a free press followed by real multi-party elections”. When Varadkar was tánaiste, Móglaí Bap points out, he led a trade mission to Saudi Arabia , “getting photos with fellas” responsible for “beheading people”. Fair play to you for brining supplies to Cuba and opposing the embargo. When you're there - might I suggest you call for the restoration of free speech, free assembly and a free press followed by real multi-party elections. Cubans haven't been allowed to elect their own... — Leo Varadkar (@LeoVaradkar) March 16, 2026 “I don’t doubt that there are problems there, big problems,” Mo Chara says of Cuba. “But that’s not why we were there. We were there because women who are pregnant can’t get medication; they’re looking for milk for their newborns. These are humanitarian problems. “I’m not going to go over and tell Cuba how to run itself, and solve all the political issues of Cuba. We were there strictly for reasons of humanitarian aid. It is short-term relief. We’re not going to solve anything else ... But I understand.” Móglaí Bap says: “Collective punishment – regardless of what your opinion is on Cuba, Palestine, Iran – is never acceptable. It is never justified. “Whatever Cuba does, or Iran does, whatever restrictions they have on free speech, if you don’t agree with the governments in those countries, it doesn’t make [collective punishment] justified.” Embargo protest: Kneecap in Cuba in March. Photograph: Yamil Lage/AFP via Getty In the Ireland of the mid 20th century, Móglaí Bap says, women were barred from working in the public sector after marriage. “My grandmother had to give up her job. But you can’t start bombing people because you think they’re conservative.” Kneecap had another appointment today, but it has been cancelled, so, with some extra time on their hands, Mo Chara and Móglaí Bap retreat to a corner table downstairs. Their brothers arrive, and a succession of people walk in and out of the scene, including a man who shows a photograph on his phone of him dressed as DJ Próvaí; two children in their school uniforms, who chat with Kneecap in Irish about their lives; and a fan from Indonesia who has a multicoloured “Tiocfaidh Ár Lá” tattoo on her arm. The new album’s introduction, Éire go Deo, is a tribute to champions of the Irish language. The track, which is based on a sample by the musician Róis, includes words from Móglaí Bap’s parents; their teacher Brendán Ó Fiach; the late writer Manchán Magan ; and Ciarán Mac Giolla Bhéin , the president of Conradh na Gaeilge, who came to Kneecap’s first gig. “We’re standing on the shoulders of these giants,” Mo Chara says. (He also mentions the broadcaster Rónán Mac Aodha Bhuí .) Outside, Móglaí Bap wants to draw attention to something on the wall. It’s not the large Kneecap murals but something that’s the result of campaigning by Irish speakers from the area. He points with a smile: the street sign is in Irish. Fenian is released by Heavenly Recordings on Friday, May 1st; Kneecap play the AVA festival , Belfast, on Saturday, May 30th