Fenian: a word taken back
In Belfast, Fenian is still a word you can be called in anger, a sectarian slur for a Catholic or a republican. Kneecap made it the title of their album.
The word began as a boast. In the old Irish tales the Fianna were roving warrior-bands under Fionn mac Cumhaill, sworn to the defence of the island, and the stories about them are the Fenian Cycle. When the republican John O'Mahony helped found the Fenian Brotherhood in New York in 1858, the American sister of the Irish Republican Brotherhood sworn in Dublin that same year, he reached for that name on purpose. It cast a new independence movement as the heirs of those mythic fighters.
In the North the name soured. By the twentieth century it had become the slur it still is, thrown at Catholics across the North, in Scotland, and in Australia. Naming the record FENIAN takes the word back and wears it in the open, the same move O'Mahony made a century and a half earlier.
The reclamation runs past a single word, into the language itself. The Gaelic League, Conradh na Gaeilge, set out in 1893 to keep Irish alive as a spoken tongue rather than a museum piece. More than a century on, the Identity and Language (Northern Ireland) Act 2022 gave Irish official recognition in the North for the first time and created an Irish Language Commissioner. Kneecap rap mostly in Irish for the same reason the League was founded: a language you use in public is a claim you are not going anywhere.
Underneath the word and the language sits the constitutional question the album keeps circling. The Good Friday Agreement, written into the Northern Ireland Act 1998, binds the British government to call a referendum on a united Ireland if it ever looks likely to pass. The 2021 census then recorded, for the first time in the state's history, more people from a Catholic background than a Protestant one (45.7% against 43.48%). A hundred years after partition cut the six counties off, the demographic arithmetic that partition was built to protect has quietly turned over.
Ireland and Palestine: one struggle
On the Falls Road in west Belfast, Palestinian flags hang from the lampposts. A short walk away on the Shankill, loyalist murals fly the flag of Israel. The city reads the war in Gaza through its own history, and it has done so for decades. One mural in the nationalist districts shows an IRA volunteer and a PLO fighter side by side under the slogan "one struggle."
The claim those walls make is older than the Troubles. The same empire that partitioned Ireland in 1921 held the mandate over Palestine, and its Balfour Declaration of 1917, Arthur Balfour's promise of "a national home for the Jewish people" in a land Britain did not yet control, set the terms for what came after. Irish republicans look at Palestine and recognise the machinery: a border drawn in London, a people told their claim to the place counts for less.
The link runs deeper than sympathy. The early Provisional IRA is reported to have had dealings with the PLO in the 1970s. In 1981, as ten republican prisoners starved themselves to death in the H-Blocks, Palestinian prisoners in Israel's Nafha jail smuggled out a letter of solidarity that was read aloud at a rally in Belfast. Bobby Sands and the Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani are painted on the same walls.
What binds the two is a shared experience of state power. Northern Ireland was engineered to keep one community on top. Electoral boundaries were gerrymandered to manufacture unionist councils, a property-based franchise left many with no local vote (Catholics, poorer on average, worst affected), and discrimination in housing and public jobs was open and routine. In the 1960s Catholics made up about 35% of the population and held roughly 6% of council seats. The comparison to apartheid is not a flourish: the South African government itself cited Northern Ireland's laws to defend its own, according to the secretary-general of the International Commission of Jurists. When the civil rights movement marched for one-man-one-vote, the state answered with batons, and on Bloody Sunday in 1972 with live rounds.
Palestinians, the republican argument runs, have met the same logic carried further. The charge against Israel in Gaza is no longer a claim confined to activists. Amnesty International concluded in December 2024 that Israel was committing genocide. In August 2025 the International Association of Genocide Scholars resolved the same, with 86% of those voting in favour. In September 2025 the UN's Independent International Commission of Inquiry found that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza, identifying four of the five genocidal acts named in the 1948 Convention. The governments still disputing that finding are, for the most part, Israel and the states that arm it.
Kneecap have said this from the start. Mo Chara has pointed out the band raised Palestine "at every single gig since the band's formation," long before October 2023, from the Coachella stage to Glastonbury, and the album carries its own track, "Palestine," with the Palestinian artist Fawzi. On "Carnival" they put it flatly: "The Brits are at it again." The charge reads two ways at once, at the policing and prosecution the band has faced at home, and at the older imperial hand that runs from Belfast to Gaza.