’PARNTLY the Kneecap thing is a question of art. Or more specifically, a question of art and its limits.

DUP leader Gavin Robinson said this week that what he objects to is “the grotesque way in which they [Kneecap] engage in the arts”, which is probably an opinion held by most comfortably upholstered men of a certain age, but not so much by younger generations at whom the band’s inflammatory and unfailingly newsworthy comments are aimed.

But alleged transgressions against the limits of art, wherever those limits may be situated, don’t always attract the industrial amounts of opprobrium that have been directed at Kneecap. Take loyalist bands, for instance. Now you may or may not consider them to be part of the arts scene and you may think that somebody dressing up as a milkman to play The Billy Boys and No Pope of Rome isn’t quite the same as McKellen’s King Lear at the National. You may even think that Stewarty batin’ the ballix out of a big bass drum with a picture of a UVF Taig-slayer on it isn’t the same as Kneecap filling the SSE. 

But thankfully you don’t make those decisions – we have an organisation, conveniently called the Arts Council, which does. And the Arts Council has decided that loyalist bands who pay tribute to UVF killers aren’t deserving of the loathing and disgust of all right-thinking people; the Arts Council has decided that they should get money for new instruments so that the people of Ardoyne can have a deeper appreciation of the sectarian tunes drifting across the Crumlin Road from the annual Brian Robinson Memorial Parade.

And just as importantly, BBC Ulster and the DUP also don’t think that the handing over of £30k in cash to three bands who take part in the UVF parade is worthy of the same loathing and disgust that have been hosed at Kneecap over the course of the past few days.

The bands who got ten grand each from the Arts Council didn’t reveal on their instrument funding application that they employ their musical skills in appreciation of a UVF man who shot dead an innocent Catholic at Ardoyne shops in September 1989; but neither did the Arts Council establish in the due diligence searches they say they carry out. That failure, similarly, is not considered by the great and the good to be worthy of out loathing and disgust. And so the Freeman Memorial Flute Band, Monkstown YCV Flute Band and Shankill Road Defenders Flute Band are going to be playing their shiny, brand-new instruments at Our Wee Country’s biggest UVF musical spectacular come the autumn.

And that’s where we are in the Year of Our Lord 2025 when it comes to the arts and artists. Open your mouth about Palestine and the Tories and you get a punishment beating; play songs for a UVF killer and not a word’s said about it. Except “Who do we make the cheque out to?”