French town drops music festival funding over Kneecap booking
Kneecap have been extremely vocal about the Israel-Gaza conflict
The booking of Kneecap for the Rock-en-Seine music festival has led to the local municipal authority withdrawing their funding for the event.
The annual festival takes place between August 21 and August 24 in the Parisian suburb of Saint-Cloud, located to the west of the French capital.
Their presence on the line-up has resulted in the Saint-Cloud city hall confirming that they have dropped their €40,000 subsidy that had been ear-marked for the event organisers.
In a statement released on Wednesday, the authorities confirmed that the figure had been agreed but the decision was made to cut their funding following the final line-up of the festival being confirmed earlier this month.
The local authority said it respected the festival's programming freedom and did not 'enter into any negotiations with a view to influencing the programming'.
Kneecap have been extremely vocal about the Israel-Gaza conflict
Today's News in 90 Seconds - July 17th
The statement added: 'On the other hand it does not finance political action, nor demands, and even less calls to violence, such as calls to kill lawmakers, whatever their nationality.'
The Belfast trio have seen a number of their recent gigs cancelled following backlash over the group's comments about Israel's destruction of Gaza.
UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer was among those to criticise the rappers' appearance at Glastonbury late last month.
A criminal investigation was launched by British police following Kneecap's performance at the English festival, with local police stating there is 'no place in society for hate'.
The group led the packed crowed in chants of 'f**k Keir Starmer' with the BBC opting not to live stream the performance.
Kneecap member Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh was previously charged with a terrorism offence for allegedly displaying the flag of Hezbollah at a gig in London last November.
The rapper, who performs under the name Mo Chara, appeared before a court in London over the charge, which he denies.
The Kneecap star could make legal history if he opts to use an Irish language interpreter at his next appearance before the British court in August.
Ó hAnnaidh has indicated he'll ask for a translator at his next court appearance, and Committee on the Administration of Justice (CAJ) director Daniel Holder says it could make legal history.
Irish is recognised in UK law as a minority language, and the rapper could argue he wants to use Irish as his right to freedom of expression without discrimination.
'If you have a case where someone is charged with a criminal offence and they do not understand English it is part of their right to a fair trial that they have an interpreter,' the legal expert recently told Sunday World.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Irish Times
4 minutes ago
- Irish Times
A good spread of food memoirs: from the sanitised to the ‘slutty'
Picky Author : Jimi Famurewa ISBN-13 : 978-1399739542 Publisher : Hodder & Stoughton Guideline Price : £20 The Jackfruit Chronicles Author : Shahnaz Ahsan ISBN-13 : 978-0008683795 Publisher : Harper North Guideline Price : £16.99 Moveable Feasts: Paris in Twenty Meals Author : Chris Newens ISBN-13 : 978-1805224204 Publisher : Profile Books Guideline Price : £18.99 Tart: Misadventures of an Anonymous Chef Author : Slutty Cheff ISBN-13 : 978-1526682697 Publisher : Bloomsbury Guideline Price : £16.99 Care and Feeding Author : Laurie Woolever ISBN-13 : 978-0063327603 Publisher : Ecco Guideline Price : £22 Strong Roots: A Ukrainian Family Story of War, Exile and Hope Author : Olia Hercules ISBN-13 : 978-1526662927 Publisher : Bloomsbury Circus Guideline Price : £20 Early on in Picky, his ode to growing up second-generation British Nigerian and 1990s junk food, restaurant critic Jimi Famurewa unmasks the illusion that is food memoir. 'Working as a food writer,' he writes, 'can have a warping effect on childhood memories ... The past becomes an editable document.' It's provocative but risks spoiling the show. There's masterful writing, as Famurewa rhapsodises about a Twix 'scraped down to a soggy, denuded girder of a shortbread', the 'wincing remnants' of Brannigans crisps. It's refreshing to read an account of a reasonably happy existence – especially when it's of a single-parent son. Picky is also a significant meditation about the 'cultural performance of immigrant life', crucial to understanding the machinations of code-switching that is instinctive to multinational children. He is wonderful at expressing the heightened sensations of childhood, such as the giddiness of travelling to the US as an unaccompanied minor, 'a continent-hopping Paddington Bear of the sky'. His paean to McDonald's enlightened this second-generation immigrant reader why the 'slender, elegant uniformity of McDonald's fries in a pillar-box-red sleeve' held not only me, but my parents, in its sway. Famurewa, whose previous book was the eloquent Settlers, about the British black African experience – is a thoughtful, thorough writer. However, in a memoir the author must be the star, and even though he studied drama at Royal Holloway, Famurewa is reluctant. Out of respect, he never really delves into the people he loves, particularly his mother. Perhaps it's his British reserve coupled with the modesty of a 'Nice Nigerian Boy' but in Famurewa's conscientious refusal to manipulate his story, he and his characters never really take flight. READ MORE Shahnaz Ahsan. Photograph: Tracey Aiston If Famurewa is diffident about showcasing his immigrant family, Shahnaz Ahsan has no qualms about bragging about hers. Her cookbook memoir, The Jackfruit Chronicles, starts with her grandfather Habib, who arrives in Manchester from what is now Bangladesh in 1953 and starts a family that thrives despite Enoch Powell, Thatcher-era racism and post-9/11 anti-Muslim sentiment. British-Bangladeshis such as Habib created what we know as the 'Indian curry house', where one pot of house gravy is tailored into different dishes with proteins, vegetables and spices. Jackfruit's 'Benglish' recipes offer an intriguing glimpse of early immigrant adaptation: cheese and Patak pickle pinwheels, crumpets swapped for the flatbread chitoi pitha. Unfortunately, Ahsan's style is prone to cliched platitudes that emphasise the wonderfulness of a clan for whom 'food is the love language which we share'. 'Thank you,' she writes, 'to Aneesa and all the other aunties who pass on their wisdom both in and out of the kitchen.' Ahsan grew up on Enid Blyton, and Winona Ryder's Little Women, and it shows in her relentlessly heartwarming prose. Her characters lack nuance; her jokes fall flat. There's a touch of preachiness to Ahsan, who as a teenager would hide 'lads' mags' such as Zoo (where Jimi Famuwera once worked) 'in the belief that if we could, somehow, limit the availability of this media, women would actually be regarded with a modicum of respect one day'. In some families there is a refrain: Someone should write about how marvellous we are. The Jackfruit Chronicles is exactly the kind of saga that your grandma would bless. Food writer Olia Hercules , from London, must stand by as the landscape and people of her idyllic Ukrainian childhood are demolished. Her parents' home, built 'to retire in, to grow weathered in, alongside the creased riverbank that stretches below' is occupied by the Russian military. However, as she realises in Strong Roots, the war opens up another past, one whose wounds had been covered over during more halcyon days. 'When I was growing up, I never questioned why we talked about certain things in half-whispers,' she writes. 'My grandparents' memories were 'mined' and had to be trodden on lightly for a long time.' The irony is that the tales that Hercules gathers – horrifying, hilarious – might have been discarded were it not for the current terror. She's not alone; hordes of Ukrainians, since the war began, have been scrambling to preserve their heritage. However, such stories come with a cost, as Hercules realises when she prods her grandmother Vera for what is ancient and unendurable. '(F)rom out of her stiff body came a stiff voice ... I understood that her stiffness was a barrier, a barrier against the past, perhaps to shield her from things that she might have never discussed before.' There are some overripe moments. (For example: 'A list of occasions when I see my ancestors' smiles' that includes 'my children's eyes'.) However, Hercules knows how to mix lushness with crisp, unyielding fact; what's more, instead of explaining her characters, she describes them. Her grandmother Vera excitedly gets ready for a 'foto sessiya' with a crinoline blouse and 'huge lacquered hair'. 'I need you to be natural, grandma!' Hercules shrieks, and makes her change. The people in Hercules's book have been maturing inside her for a lifetime, gathering richness. They can be stubborn, quick to anger and vain; she conveys the way they talk over each other, and how their punchlines falter. Hercules's people may be strong, but she has also rendered them so vividly so that they will endure. They are blood, breath and bone – shut your eyes and they resound with exuberant cacophony. Slutty Cheff Slutty Cheff , the anonymous author of Tart, is a few years shy of 30. As her name suggests, she's a horny workaholic in an esteemed London restaurant, and bangs many a dish, on and off the line. She's white, socially privileged and loves her parents; she's at the sweet spot in life when things are on the cusp. In short, you'd hate her if she weren't so winningly self-deprecating. Tart is not strict memoir. As Slutty told British Vogue, 'Stories are based on my stories, and stories of my chef friends,' which makes it all the more entertaining, an updated 18th-century picaresque where the rogue hero is a woman 'who will feed your desire, like a Tesco meal deal'. Plus, although Tart has plenty of fat-and-sugar stoked steam, its author knows that the cardinal rule for both culinary and erotic writing is to stay crisp and dry. She observes, 'The other reason why I don't want people to know about my lover is far more important than gender politics: the man I'm sleeping with has a topknot.' There are darker aspects of Tart, like panic attacks and a sleazy co-worker, and Slutty confesses, 'Whenever I lose the sense of who I am or what I do, or I spin into disassociation or fall into a sense of depression I feel scared and worry that I'll never be happy again. There are two things in my life that are a constant reminder that pleasure exists: food and sex.' Anthony Bourdain. Photograph: Alex Welsh/The New York Times The kitchen, touted by many as an artistic vocation, can also be a form of self-medication, its mania an addictive panacea for people too terrified to stop. Laurie Woolever is 22 when Care and Feeding begins. She has a lot in common with Slutty, except instead of present-day London, she lives in 1996 New York. A blond Ivy League graduate who can cook and write, she will become assistant to the two chefs synonymous with that era's culinary machismo – the not-yet #MeToo'ed, evangelist of Italian cuisine Mario Batali, and Kitchen Confidential author Anthony Bourdain. Much as in Tart, what unfolds is a heady rush of alcohol, food, dirty sex and high-calibre work, proving that whoever said drink and drugs were counterproductive was wrong. Except. Let's just say that we hope Slutty doesn't suffer like Woolever in 20 years. This raw, scalding book is about what happens when one's career is ascendant while one's personal life unravels. Some events are spectacularly badly timed; shortly after Woolever gets sober, her husband leaves her and Bourdain kills himself. Woolever is briskly inventive, like when she describes a lamb tongue's salad as 'intriguing because of the truffles and provocative because of the tongue'. She's deadpan about Ferran Adria, pink limousines and a writer who 'had a revolting Humbert Humbert-ish way with wine descriptors ... bottles were 'sexy babies' and 'flirtatious teens'. Still, an attraction of the book is the two outsized men with whom she was affiliated, and on this Woolever delivers, sometimes reconfiguring their signature swaggers in unexpected ways. About Batali (who concluded a written apology about his misconduct with a recipe for cinnamon rolls) she's gentle – he's an erudite, generous monster who's a surprisingly astute observer of her spiralling behaviour. Regarding Bourdain, whose kindness she paints in many lights, Woolever gives him a remarkable send-off. 'He had,' she states, 'made the colossally stupid, but somehow wholly plausible decision to die of a broken heart.' If only she wasn't so excruciatingly hard on herself. Woolever details every embarrassing incident in her life, and reprints her journal extracts and emails with every blemish – they're broken and sloppy, the sort of thing a vainer writer would want permanently erased. However, much of Care and Feeding makes you crave reckless behaviour, such as that 'woozy punch-in-the-face feeling' of a gin-and-tonic at a Sri Lanka bar. You can't forget the brilliant accomplishments – in kitchens and elsewhere – that were fuelled by the admittedly toxic adrenaline of that time. Compare Woolever and Slutty to the more virtuous recollections of Famurewa, Ahsan, and Hercules; consider that there won't be a Batali autobiography any time soon, and it seems that, at least for now, in the world of food memoir, it will still be the white girls who have the most fun. Chris Newens. Photograph: Sabine Dundure In Moveable Feasts , Chris Newens seeks, in each of Paris's arrondissements, a dish that encapsulates something of the city's soul. Methodical and charming, Newens starts his research the old-fashioned way, by talking to strangers, waylaying Sri Lankan plongeurs on a sleeper train and sniffy haute bourgeoises after church. In the world, Paris is the city most famously defined by its outsiders. As his title suggests, Newens's teenage hero was Ernest Hemingway, and he is caught between the schoolboy fancies that lured him there, and the mercurial, multinational Paris that keeps him. His city hovers between unconventional and stereotype, with diaspora dishes that are also predictably Parisian (bahn-mi in the 13th), croissants and Congolese-style malangwa fish. As a white English man with fluent French, Newens can navigate the homeless in the Bois des Vincennes and a 1993 Saint-Émilion with equanimity. More than Hemingway's A Moveable Feast, Newens recalls another culinary Paris chestnut, George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London. Like Orwell, Newens is at his best when he is observing individuals where they work, like the employees at the smoothly functioning colossus of decent-priced dining, Bouillon République. Many memoirs touch on home, that mysterious place where you belong. A Paris expat like Newens, however, decides to settle in a place where he will forever be foreign. It's not a choice all Paris immigrants make. For the Sri Lankan waiter at La Fontaine de Mars or the Peruvian-American student at the Cordon Bleu, there's a yearning for geographical and emotional permanence, to become an indelible part of the city's history. It is our sincere, if somewhat naive, hope that they will.
Irish Daily Mirror
4 minutes ago
- Irish Daily Mirror
Jules Thomas got to say private goodbye to her long-time lover Ian Bailey
Jules Thomas got to say a private goodbye to her long-time lover Ian Bailey and threw most of his ashes into Dumanus Bay as was his dying request. She and his sister Kay Reynolds met up several days after a memorial service for the former journalist and long-time suspect in the Sophie Toscan du Plantier murder, was held for his friends in West Cork. Artist Jules, who lived with Bailey for more than 30 years until they split up in 2021, got very upset when she discovered she wasn't invited to the original service. She revealed: 'It was all a bit of a misunderstanding. I heard from a journalist up in Dublin the day before that this get-together for Ian was going ahead and I could not believe I wasn't asked. 'It turned out that his sister Kay did not have a telephone number for me and a few days later she made contact. 'One of Ian's dying wishes was to have his ashes released in Dunmanus Bay. So Kay and I met up and went up to the Cliff Road to do it. However the tide was out so we had to come back the next day and scatter his ashes when the sea was in. 'I said my final goodbye to him, it was very emotional because we had been through so much together. The whole Sophie Toscan du Plantier murder had ruined all our lives. 'I got to throw most of his ashes into the sea – the bag was very heavy, but he was a very tall man after all. We laid him to rest and that's all that matters.' Ian Bailey. (Image: AFP via Getty Images) The self-professed poet, 66, dropped dead from a massive heart attack as he walked down the street near his home in Bantry, Co Cork in January 2024. Jules, who has an incurable disease, chronic lymphocytic leukaemia, a form of blood cancer, said Ian adored his little sister Kay. She stated: 'Kay had no idea how sick Ian was in the months before he died. She knew nothing about his heart condition and that his life was in danger because they couldn't operate. 'He was very protective of her and didn't want to tell her in case it caused her worry. So when he died Ian's death came as a great shock to her and she found it very difficult to cope and deal with. 'I enjoyed our time together and we gave him the proper send-off that he deserved.' But Jules told how she is writing a new book on the Sophie murder and is determined to tell her side of the story before she dies. The French film-maker, 39, was found battered to death on a lane 100 yards from her holiday home in Christmas 1996. Nobody has ever been charged with the murder. Bailey was arrested twice but never charged. Ian Bailey and Jules Thomas in 2017 A French court found him guilty of the murder in absentia in. 2019 and sentenced him to 25 years jail. Bailey always denied any involvement and didn't do a day behind bars after the Irish courts refused to extradite him to France. Jules, who provided Bailey with an alibi on the night of the murder, was also arrested as part of the investigation. She said: 'I actually think I know who carried out the murder – someone with very powerful connections in this country. I will be writing everything in the book. I want to set the record straight once and for all. 'The truth is Ian may not have been perfect because he was not a killer. I kept telling them that but the Gardaí wouldn't listen. Ian couldn't even kill a turkey for God sake, let alone a human being.' Sign up to the Irish Mirror's Courts and Crime newsletter here and get breaking crime updates and news from the courts direct to your inbox.
Irish Daily Mirror
4 minutes ago
- Irish Daily Mirror
Plans to open historic buildings as Easter Rising visitor centre may take years
Plans to open a number of historic buildings in the capital as a visitor centre commemorating the Easter Rising may still take several years. Junior Minister Kevin 'Boxer' Moran has informed the Dáil that while the project is a priority for his Government, it wasn't yet possible to say when it would be open to the public. The buildings at 14-17 Moore Street have been at the centre of a major campaign to preserve them due to their historical significance to the 1916 Rising. The buildings were the headquarters of the Provisional Irish Government, and it is where a number of signatories of the Irish proclamation, including James Connolly and Patrick Pearse, surrendered from. The Government previously decided to accept the recommendations of the Moore Street Advisory Group to move ahead with a project to conserve the buildings and open it as a visitor site. However, Minister Moran admitted it was still too early to say when that would happen. Kevin "Boxer" Moran Under questioning from Sinn Féin TD, Aengus O Snodaigh, Minister Moran said: 'It is not possible, in advance of the approval of Ministerial Consent, to be precise about the timing of construction works; however, the project at Moore Street is a priority and it is anticipated that there will be meaningful progress onsite in 2026.' Deputy O'Snodaigh said there were concerns about dry rot other causes for the rotting of fabrics in the structure of the national monument . Mr Moran said: 'In response to concerns about fabric deterioration, including issues such as dry rot and timber decay, the OPW has engaged specialist consultants in historic timber, plaster, and wallpaper conservation. 'These experts have conducted targeted surveys and provided professional guidance to identify and mitigate risks to the buildings' most vulnerable features. These reports inform interim protective measures and I can assure the Deputy that the buildings are being carefully maintained and protected.' Subscribe to our newsletter for the latest news from the Irish Mirror direct to your inbox: Sign up here.
