Kneecap’s Móglaí Bap has spoken about his mother’s death by suicide in advance of the release of a song he wrote in tribute to her called Irish Goodbye.
The Belfast rapper, whose name is Naoise Ó Cairealláin, said watching video footage of his mother, Aoife Ní Riain, in which she was happy, had a “profound effect” on him.
“Watching that footage of her and writing this song, unlocked a part of my brain that gave me the opportunity to override the constant sad memories. It allowed me to visualise happier times, instead of being so angry at the world,” he said on Instagram.
Ní Riain, who died in 2020, was an Irish language activist and traditional musician who had her own show on the community radio station Raidió Fáilte.
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Móglaí Bap’s father, Gearóid Ó Cairealláin, was president of Conradh na Gaelige in the 1990s. The rapper was inspired to write the song about his mother after watching a documentary about his father in which the family featured.
“The film crew came to our house, and we were just kids doing our homework, messing around. We weren’t the kind of family who had films of ourselves when we were young, just photographs, so it was the first time I saw my Ma in a video. And she was happy,” Móglaí Bap said.
He said he had written a song about his mother before, called Mam, which came out in 2020.
“She was sick at the time with depression. The idea I had in my head with Mam was, if I wrote it, she’d hear it, and maybe she’d feel her worth, because when you suffer from depression, you can’t see your own value.
“At that time, we went for a walk, and I told her I had written a song for her, but that it wasn’t completely finished yet, so I’d wait until the next day to play it for her. But by then it was too late.”
[ Kneecap: ‘These topics have been out of bounds for many years’Opens in new window ]
Describing suicide as “a very complex thing” that was difficult to talk about, Moglaí Bap said it should be spoken about “because we have to alleviate that extra burden of shame and guilt on top of the burden of grief”.
The artist said help was available: “When I was eventually ready for it, therapy was the thing that helped me. A lot of our parents’ generation don’t believe in therapy. But we’re different. We can ask for help, we should ask for help, and there should be services there for us to get help.”
Irish people had a good relationship with death and the rituals around it, he said. “We can remember people how they were, not how they ended up. I hope that this kind of death, even though it’s awful, can be included under that approach, as hard as it is to deal with.”
He hoped that if people listened to the song “maybe something will connect that gives them some sort of relief”.
“You can’t carry this stuff around with you and blame yourself. It’s not your fault. It’s no one’s fault. It’s about the process of dealing with it. And you can deal with it. You can,” Moglaí Bap said.
Irish Goodbye, featuring English spoken word poet Kae Tempest, will be released on Tuesday, April 28th, with Kneecap’s new album Fenian coming on Friday, May 1st. In a five-star review of the album in The Irish Times, Ed Power wrote of Irish Goodbye: “The final fade to grey arrives with the gorgeous, piano-fuelled Kae Tempest duet Irish Goodbye – a melancholic farewell at the end of a knockout album.”
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