Editorial: The disgraceful grant to Kneecap is reinstated by the government, yet Kemi Badenoch seemed not to realise that such things happen in Northern Ireland

​The response to the very concept of Kneecap, both the band and the film, has been appalling.​

One of the band members, known as DJ Provai, almost always walks round in a balaclava, and indeed was in such outside court in Belfast yesterday for their legal victory.

The balaclava is painted green, white and orange, presumably to denote that it is Irish republican headgear. After all, a balaclava that was merely black could be either a loyalist or a republican one, and there would not be much laughter if – even for a moment – Catholics thought that anyone was making light of loyalist terrorists.

And rightly not. Loyalists murdered Catholics for being Catholics. In fact, far from having assistance of the UK security forces via collusion, loyalists killed more than 1,000 people, of whom fewer than 50 were republican paramilitaries. It was much easier to shoot Catholics in the head.

It is inconceivable that any group that made light of such disgusting past loyalist violence would be subject to awards and gushing reviews. Exactly the sort of reviews and awards Kneecap have been getting, now including from the BBC – which had already given plenty of uncritical coverage to Kneecap.

That brave, long-standing critic of terrorists, and specifically of the child abuse of kneecapping, Prof Liam Kennedy has been one of the only voices against the extensive lauding of Kneecap.

Meanwhile, the Tory leader Kemi Badenoch has rightly criticised the Labour government for spinelessness in dropping the appeal against the funding of Kneecap.

But she showed her own ignorance of what is happening in NI by stopping the disgraceful grant to them in the first place. She thought such things were easy, so clearly had no idea of the daily horrors that are happening – culturally and politically and legally – to sanitise past republican terrorism retrospectively in this country.