These Irish rappers faced court on terror charges. Now they’re back, and as mouthy as ever

Before I sit down to chat with Kneecap, their publicist tells me, “we’ll need to get a sense of the themes and topics you’d like to cover and have those approved by management prior”.

It’s the sort of move that has become all too common in the world of celebrity interviews, and it’s as annoying as hell. But in the case of the hip-hop trio from Northern Ireland, it’s frankly baffling. Their entire persona is founded upon speaking their minds and not giving a toss if they offend people in the process.

I first met the lads – rappers Mo Chara (real name Liam Óg Ó Hannaidh) and Móglaí Bap (Naoise Ó Cairealláin) and producer DJ Próvaí (JJ Ó Dochartaigh) – in the offices of Frontier Touring in March 2025, when they were in Australia for a series of shows that included Golden Plains, a free gig at Melbourne’s Federation Square, and a run of small club shows (at one of which the head of a statue of King George V famously made a guest appearance on stage).

In the year since, the band have rapidly gone from niche act to one of the most visible on the planet precisely because they say what they think, without fear or favour. In short, Kneecap have blown up by blowing off.

So, why the sudden concern?

“There is an added layer of legality informing what they can and cannot speak about,” the PR explains in an email. Ah, that there is.

The band have been strong supporters of the Palestinian cause, and harsh critics of the Israeli government’s military campaign in Gaza, and that has made them the target of relentless attacks from some quarters. They have been investigated by British police over comments made on stage at Glastonbury, faced calls for their US visas to be revoked over text projected on screen at Coachella and, most seriously, faced charges of supporting a terror organisation after Mo Chara picked up and brandished a Hezbollah flag that had been tossed onstage at a London gig in November 2024.

But by the time we speak, a UK appeal court has decided that charge will not proceed. The case was first thrown out on a technicality in September 2025; the latest decision, handed down on March 12, should mark the end of a matter that has cast a very real pall over the trio’s ascendancy for the past year.

“I don’t think they can go anywhere [with the charges],” says Mo Chara. “Obviously, there is a massive relief there now that we can kind of move on.”

“Maybe we’ll go for it this time,” says Móglaí Bap. “We might take them to court this time.”

“Because look at me, Karl, I can’t sleep anymore,” Mo Chara continues. “I think there might be a lawsuit. I’m pissing myself in bed and stuff, you know, with the stress.”

They are, obviously, joking. “A sense of fun and humour is a big part of how Irish people process things,” says Móglaí Bap. “Whether it’s something small or something dramatic, humour has always been a way for us to deal with the past.”

But speaking to the boys – DJ Próvaí isn’t present for the interview – it’s clear that the legal drama and the endless attention of the tabloid media in the UK have been genuinely exhausting. For a start, it put the brakes on their hectic touring schedule, just when momentum dictated it was time to spread the Irish-language gospel far and wide.

Contrary to much reporting, though, they insist they have not actually been banned from the US, Canada, or anywhere else.

“We’ve never been turned down for a visa because we haven’t applied for anything,” says Mo Chara. “So now this is over and done with, we can apply for visas again, including for Australia. We’ll be there soon, hopefully. Same with America and all these other places – we just made the decision that it was in our interest not to apply right now.”

The crescendo around the band – the attempted kneecapping of Kneecap, if you will – peaked last UK summer. “It was chaotic,” says Móglaí Bap. “We were in the studio [recording new album Fenian, their third] for seven weeks, and during that seven weeks we had the court case, so we had to leave the safe space of the studio, going out to the paparazzi and getting dragged about on camera, and then we did Wembley Arena, our biggest gig outside Ireland.”

Amidst the chaos, the studio sessions with producer Dan Carey “provided us a space where we could kind of forget about the outside world”.

“He brought some maturity and complexity to the sound,” says Mo Chara. “That was important to us.

“With the Irish language, and with hip-hop in general, unless you’re being extremely braggadocious all the time it can almost border on a parody act,” he continues. “And I feel like now, with us being established, we wanted this album to be a lot more mature and musical. So Dan was perfect. It was our simplicity mixed with his complexity that has meshed together, and we just found that sweet spot where it was still authentically Kneecap but also a big level up.”

There are still the big bangers on Fenian – not least on the title track with its stadium-ready chorus of FE-FE-FE-FE-FEN-IAN – but there’s much musing, too, on the events of the past year.

“Every day in the news me and Kneecap are not the story, a genocide is happening,” they sing on Carnival (well, that’s the English translation of what they sing in Irish Gaelic). “Distraction is the mission … history will remember, you pieces of shit, and you’ll never be forgiven.”

Elsewhere, on Irish Goodbye, Móglaí Bap sings of and to his mother, who took her own life.

“When life gave you lemons
You squeezed them in your open wounds
I miss you every fucking day.”

It’s a song full of rage and pain, but with little of the braggadocious swagger Mo Chara mentions. Did you feel exposed writing a track like that?

“It is more exposed, but it feels comforting because I get messages from people who relate to it,” says Móglaí Bap. “That type of death can feel very isolating. Especially in the north – and around the world, I suppose – it’s still taboo, you don’t really hear about people’s stories. So the exposure of it actually makes me feel a bit more relatable to people, a bit more understood.”

On Liar’s Tale, they sing about the exhaustion of being constantly in the public eye, of always waving the flag (banned or not).

“I’m sick of always being switched on
How come it’s always on me
To be sorting everything.”

Is that a genuine feeling you’re expressing there?

“The character in this song is exaggerating his frustration, I suppose,” says Móglaí Bap. “It’s a frustration, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.

“If I look at Harry Styles or whatever, he doesn’t talk about politics, he just does music, and in one way that seems like the ideal thing to do because it’d be stress free. But in reality, being from where we come from, this is just the way we’re brought up. There’s a long tradition of artists in Ireland using their platforms to talk about apartheid in South Africa or the Catholic Church, anything.

“Obviously, in an ideal world, we’d just be talking about music. But we just feel it’s part of our duty. So in this character, in that song, yeah, I suppose it’s exhaustion, but at the same time, it’s just the way it is, and we’re happy to take that.”

Do you generally write as characters? Is that how you see what you’re doing, creating a character who’s got the voice in that track, and then you move on to a different one?

“Well, kind of,” Móglaí Bap says. “Every character is an exaggeration of that emotion, an amplified version of reality in a sense. But it’s entertainment as well, so you’re blending those things together. That’s why we have these stage names. That’s part of the Kneecap show.”

“It is an exaggeration of yourself, but to say it’s a character would be doing it a slight disservice,” Mo Chara offers. “Obviously, you are performing, but you are doing an extreme version of yourself that has no inhibitions, and maybe it’s more direct. But in interviews if we’re talking about something serious, we’re obviously not playing too much of a character. I think there’s a fine line there, and sometimes you have to switch.”

Kneecap have made a fine art of straddling the line between truth and character (indeed caricature). And nowhere is it more perfectly realised than in their semi-fictionalised biopic Kneecap (2024), which played such a crucial role in elevating the band from Belfast cult faves to global stars.

Ó Hannaidh and Ó Cairealláin met at an Irish-language school (O Dochartaigh was a teacher), and the Kneecap project grew out of their belief that keeping Gaelic on life support wasn’t enough – it needed to be alive, evolving, part of the youth culture of the cities as much as the preferred tongue of old-time fishermen and farmers in the Gaeltacht provinces.

“But as soon as the movie was released, we realised just how much of an international story language and cultural struggle against colonialism is,” says Mo Chara. “We had messages from people from Aboriginal Australia, Native Americans, people from around the world who had seen the movie and it really struck a chord with them. And that’s when we realised that Kneecap was more than just an Irish story, that Kneecap and the movie was very much an international story and something that connected oppressed cultures around the world.”

Kneecap is also very much about the craic, though, and you can still hear it on the new album, on songs like Headcase and Smugglers and Scholars and Fenian and Liars Tale. But the fun often comes wrapped in a protest banner.

The band’s name comes from IRA slang, as does DJ Próvaí‘s name (Mo Chara means “my friend” in Gaelic; Móglaí Bap references The Jungle Book’s Mowgli and an Irish word for head, a throwback to a haircut from Ó Cairealláin’s childhood). And if the iconography, language and themes often hark back to the bad old days of The Troubles, the band makes absolutely no apology for that.

“I think maybe the older generation are still a wee bit touchy with it, but the younger generation, whether you like it or not, humour and comedy is going to break these boundaries,” says Mo Chara.

“If I see somebody doing a skit taking the piss out of Republicans I find it f--king hilarious,” he adds. “I think we don’t give people that we disagree with enough credit. Like, everybody likes a joke, do you know what I mean? And I think because we’ve had such a culture of silence in Belfast for so long, there is such a stigma.

“We are Republican, we do believe in a United Ireland, but it doesn’t mean I couldn’t sit and have a drink with someone who opposes that belief. And the best way to create this dialogue is through humour.”

To prove the point, they cite the case of a Protestant rapper called Young Spence. “He has a song called P.R.O.D. and I love it,” says Mo Chara. “He’s authentically himself, and even though we, on paper, are maybe very different, we’re both born in Belfast, we have such a shared life, we were probably 90 per cent raised the same, we walk the same streets. And I think, finally, people are willing to speak about these things, and it’s important to create dialogue as well through comedy.”

Could you imagine sharing a stage with Young Spence?

“We already did,” says Mo Chara. “We had him come support us in our headline Belfast show.”

“And he got a really good reception,” adds Móglaí Bap.

“The media would have a tough time trying to fucking demonise us for that one,” says Mo Chara.

I’m sure the English tabloids would find a way, though.

“They always do.”

Kneecap’s new album FENIAN is out May 1.

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