Dr Ciara L. Murphy is Lecturer in Drama at TU Dublin. Her monograph Performing Social Change on the Island of Ireland: From Republic to Pandemic was published by Routledge in 2023 and she has published extensively on modern and contemporary Irish performance practice. Ciara is currently the Vice President of the Irish Society of Theatre Research (ISTR) and the Co-Convenor of the International Federation of Theatre Research Performance in Public Spaces Working Group. Ciara has worked extensively on research that informs Irish arts policy and practice. She is currently the Lead Researcher for the national Safe to Create project which aims to impact change on the culture and practices of the arts and creative sectors in Ireland to provide safer working conditions for all workers.

In her book Women and Embodied Mythmaking in Irish Theatre, Shonagh Hill observes that “myth attempts to suppress cultural context but it is also reinvigorated by, and reinterpreted in, the present. Thus, self-conscious awareness of myth’s incompleteness, of it as an ongoing process, offers the possibility for critical intervention” (21). This paper attempts to consider how the myth of Irish nationalism and nationhood intersect with complex cultural contexts emerging across the island of Ireland since the Good Friday Agreement (1998) by interrogating the performance of ‘Irish Nationalism’ in the 21st century.  

This paper contends that Belfast-based hip hop group KNEECAP intentionally contest and problematise common mythologies around ‘Irish Nationalism’ through their artwork and group aesthetic. In 2022 an unveiling of a controversial mural as part of Féile an Phobail in the summer of 2022. This mural, which depicts a PSNI (police) van on fire, intentionally layers and presents a complex performance of political values, which by design are intended to provoke its audience and question common stereotypes surrounding working-class nationalists in the north of Ireland. Their 2024 film Kneecap, I argue, demonstrates an intentional subversion of a stereotypical aesthetics.  

Using a performance studies framework, I aim to explore how KNEECAP use costume, symbols, and public artwork to intentionally contest a damaging stereotype of Northern Irish Nationalism that has pervaded public and cultural discourse over the past twenty-five years and has become more potent against the backdrop of post-Brexit negotiations, the Northern Irish Protocol, and increased calls for Irish reunification.