By and large I’ve not passed remark on the success of Belfast rap act, Kneecap. I’m pleased if it rekindles interest in the Irish language amongst another generation, call me a prude but I struggle to get the irony of an act that seems to revel in drug taking.
The controversy of the band’s political entanglement with the UK’s judiciary system has raised consideration of the feelings and experience of survivors among an estimated 2,500 people who were victims of the eponymous paramilitary punishment.
Kneecapping sometimes involved injury to the actual patella, but it was rare. Recovery from such an injury is long and precarious. Without surgery it is unlikely the victim of a direct assault on the kneecap would ever straighten their leg again.
Some victims did die because the bullet opened an artery causing such an outflow of blood that they would be beyond help by the time the paramedics reached them, even when death was not the intention of those handing out the punishment.
The practice has all but disappeared since 2002 (2024 was the first year without recording paramilitary punishments when Rodney Peyton wrote the following in The Lancet about all classes of paramilitary punishments (ie, not just ‘kneecapping’):
Almost all punishment attacks are perpetrated against young males in lower socioeconomic groups, usually unemployed, and living in low-income housing. More than 20% are teenagers, with the youngest recorded victim aged only 13 years.
In May the Nolan Show featured the story of one man in particular. Here’s the accompanying BBC report:
“It was a very lonely place… I couldn’t tell anyone why or what happened to me or why I ended up running away”, he told The Nolan Show. “No one ever asked me the question: ‘Why did you do it?’”
When he was 15 he was attacked by a gang of masked men, who said they were punishing him for stealing cars. They beat him unconscious with hammers and hurls. Two years later, he said, he was taken to a house in the Springhill area of Belfast, held there for eight hours and shot in the knees.
Mr Barker said a man put a gun at his kneecap and after one failed attempt, his kneecap “blew”, causing unbearable pain.After another attempt and the gun jamming, he said the men decided to drop paving slabs on him to break his legs.
“They done me, they beat me and then the whole area shunned me”, he said. “They busted my main artery so I had to have three operations in one week. I could have lost my leg or died.”
In Guardian this week, Rory Carroll highlighted a similar case:
Three decades later Peter McCabe, now 66, still walks with a limp and the family bears psychological wounds. The group Kneecap have reclaimed the word but for the McCabes, and many other families affected by so-called punishment violence, kneecapping retains its original meaning, connoting pain, terror and stigma.
“There is stigma attached to victims of these attacks, some of whom become outsiders and are shunned in their home localities,” said Prof Liam Kennedy. “The key is in the label ‘punishment’. This suggests that victims somehow ‘deserved’ what they got.”
Peter and Jeanitta McCabe feel that the stigma is reinforced by their exclusion from the Troubles Permanent Disability Payment (TPDP) scheme, which offers compensation to those permanently disabled physically or psychologically disabled because of the conflict. They have appealed, saying the Victims’ Payment Board unlawfully deemed them ineligible because the shooting was not defined as Troubles-related.
Their lawyer, Kevin Winters, said punishment shootings were a byproduct of the conflict. “They cannot be written out of history as if they never happened. We couldn’t possibly begin to quantify the volume of affected cases. They are in the thousands and therein may lie the real reason why these cases have been deemed out of scope – money.” The high court is expected to rule on McCabe’s case in September.
Peyton, from the perspective of 2002, ties in with this analysis…
Victims of these vicious assaults are left with permanent mental and physical scars. Their sentence is lifelong. They are marked out within their own communities, and the stigma and psychological trauma also affect their families. Judgment is passed by those they do not know, with no defence or court of appeal. Often, they do not have easy access to a rehabilitation service, and without such help they remain in a subculture of drugs and alcohol, living off social welfare, and perhaps resorting to further crimes such as stealing to support their drugs habit.
Although to some in the community there may be a deal of satisfaction in the speed of the retribution, the long-term effect is to lose the veneer of civilisation and to give unfettered power to small groups of vicious individuals to control the community by fear and intimidation. Once these people are established they are very difficult to root out and will eventually determine what is and is not acceptable behaviour on the basis of their own agenda and not that of the community at large. A fair, moral, and just society demands a system of law based on higher moral values and not those of revenge and maximum retribution.
Legacy is far more complex than what to do for so many of the victims’ families who live in dark as to what happened to their loved ones, or left hungering for a justice they may never receive. Building a “fair, moral and just society” would be a start.
Mick is founding editor of Slugger. He has written papers on the impacts of the Internet on politics and the wider media and is a regular guest and speaking events across Ireland, the UK and Europe. Twitter: @MickFealty
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