A member of Kneecap has been charged with a terrorism offence, but those in power continue to look away from the deeper crisis.

Sometimes, in the noise of political discourse, it can be unclear who is right and who is wrong. But the media and political establishment are stretching credibility beyond words if they think our understanding of reality has been so warped that we cannot see the moral collapse around the situation in Gaza.

On Tuesday, with over 50,000 Palestinians already dead, the headlines told us that 14,000 babies were now in danger of dying because Israel had blocked aid and the region was at risk of famine. On Wednesday, a young Jewish couple who worked at Israel’s embassy in Washington were shot, and the Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu said he was ‘shocked’. On Thursday, the news read that Mo Chara from the band Kneecap had been charged with a terrorism offence because he held up a Hezbollah flag that was thrown on stage in London last November.

For people in Ireland, it must feel like history is repeating itself. Once again, the British authorities get to decide who the terrorists are. Israel can kill 50,000 people and the world stands by, still sending the country arms and trading with it, but a young musician from Belfast expresses his outrage with a flag and he is accused of terrorism.

The Metropolitan Police in the UK said yesterday evening that Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh (Mo Chara) had been charged because, at the O2 Forum on 21 November 2024, he ‘displayed an article, namely a flag, in such a way or in such circumstances as to arouse reasonable suspicion that he is a supporter of a proscribed organisation, namely Hizballah’.

But the clarity of Kneecap’s thinking in a statement today is apparent: ‘This is a carnival of distraction,’ they wrote on Instagram. ‘14,000 babies are about to die of starvation in Gaza, with food sent by the world sitting on the other side of a wall, and once again the British establishment is focused on us. … We are not the story. Genocide is.’

The group are aware of the risks: the terrorism charge could restrict their ability to travel, cause the cancellation of concerts, and silence other voices – but they persist.

‘Instead of defending innocent people, or the principles of international law they claim to uphold,’ the band continued, ‘the powerful in Britain have abetted slaughter and famine in Gaza, just as they did in Ireland for centuries. Then, like now, they claim justification.’

And again this phrase appears in their statement: ‘We are on the right side of history’. The Irish are always aware of history, that they are the descendants of people who somehow survived colonialism and famine, and who knows what degradation those ancestors had to go through to make survival possible. It is impossible to take that for granted because our politics, bilingual signs, songs and commemorations remind us of it every day.

We are in a strange time in Ireland, where despite that history and all we know, our public discussions seem British or American in tone, with little context or insight into why Irish people are responding so instinctively to the crisis in Gaza. It is almost as if politicians and media do not want to make the connections, but that is impossible.

Louis Theroux’s recent documentary The Settlers on BBC 2 showed how reminiscent the ideology of some Jewish settlers in the West Bank is of how the English thought of Ireland in the 1600s. We were treated as less than human, the Irish land simply there to be taken, and it led to bloodshed on both sides for centuries. Somehow, the colonial ideology has survived into the twenty-first century. All the results of that ideology are everywhere to be seen, in carved-up countries, in bloody histories written down in books and portrayed in films and songs, but somehow communities can be blind to it and imagine their ideas are different.

Gaza is stirring up a deep feeling in Ireland and who knows where it will end. Despite the powerlessness many feel, Irish musicians have shown extraordinary courage in continuing to highlight the tragedy. Two weeks ago, the band The Murder Capital also took a stance: they insisted on having the Palestinian flag on stage in Berlin and Cologne and the promoters cancelled the concerts because of a ‘no-flags policy’. This week, a flag thrown on a stage is held up as a scandal. There is no proportion. No sense to it all.

For Kneecap, their situation is now even more serious, but they look at the despair in Gaza and refuse to indulge their own challenges. Their response to the British legal system is defiant: ‘We will fight you in your court. We will win.’

Ireland thought it could move on from its painful history, that we had left it behind once a workable peace was achieved. We did not know that we would have to keep talking about it, not for ourselves, but for others. Again, artists show the way.