Why CMAT’s Radio Edit Became a Flashpoint

This was the clip that launched 1000 TikToks. The edit shook the BBC to its core with one media outlet after another tripping over themselves to report on the censorship of the Irish language by the UK’s national broadcaster. 

For an artist like CMAT to speak Irish publicly or bake it into her art remains inherently political. It is a direct rejection of Britain’s historical attempts at linguistic erasure. For all Irish people speaking even the coupla focal, is a defiant act against oppression and cultural destruction. The Irish language remains a battleground precisely because Britain murdered people for speaking it. Erasure of an Gaeilge was a deliberate, strategic act of cultural warfare. 

@sianconway cad é an fhírinne 🤔 #fyp #cmat #gaeilgetiktok #bbc ♬ EURO-COUNTRY - CMAT

The penal-era Administration of Justice (Language) Act of 1737, barred the Irish language from public life, reflecting a deliberate cultural warfare strategy. This enduring mark of empire was only fully repealed earlier this year.

In the 19th century, children learned to fear their own words. A stick called the bata scóir was introduced to classrooms. Children were made to wear a stick tied to a string around their necks. Each time they spoke a word of Irish, a new notch was carved into the wood. By day’s end, the tally of those notches determined how many blows the child would receive. This punishment of children was part of an unbroken philosophy of domination and oppression. 

Today, learning and speaking Irish is radical precisely because it still exists. Recently the coupla focal has been growing in popularity. The Irish language now bursts forth defiantly on the world’s stages. It has infiltrated art, social media, your mates, and most dominantly, music. So to have an Irish language intro unceremoniously clipped wounded a people in the midst of reclaiming what has been systemically beaten out of their ancestors. 

In the 1960s and 70s, BBC Northern Ireland was run, as former Panorama editor Sir Paul Fox bluntly put it in The Guardian, by “the bloody Protestants”. Catholic voices on housing discrimination, on jobs, on civil rights and all other pertinent issues were smothered. Veteran journalist Martin Bell described it later as a “culture of suppression.” 

Then in 1985 Real Lives: At the Edge of the Union aired. The BBC documentary dared to put Sinn Féin’s Martin McGuinness and the DUP’s Gregory Campbell on screen in the same breath. Westminster freaked out. Margaret Thatcher had only a month before “declared that the IRA should be starved of the ‘oxygen of publicity’.” The BBC pulled the programme. BBC journalists, furious at this, staged a one‑day strike. Then came the ban years.

From 1988 to 1994, the British government forbade broadcasters from airing the voices of Sinn Féin leaders. Or anyone associated with republican paramilitaries. Their words had to be dubbed by actors, or subtitled. Gerry Adams would speak and an actor's voice would float out of his mouth like a bad lip‑sync. It was absurd. Critics called it censorship. But the BBC was bound by the law. 

2011 brought The Story of Ireland; a five‑part BBC history series that promised depth didn’t deliver it. Irish viewers instead saw a kind of neat revisionism. Famine glossed over, the Penal Laws airbrushed, the Troubles filed down to a set of narratable beats. Reddit called it “revisionist rubbish”. What it was, was systematic erasure of what Britain did to the people of Ireland. 

Of course the BBC was under fire earlier this summer for refusing to air the Kneecap set at Glastonbury.  The rap trio's Irish-language hip-hop directly challenges British colonial legacies. Their presence at Glastonbury alone triggered political anxiety in Westminster. Instead of livestreaming their performance, like they did every other act, the BBC held it back. They waited for the heat to die down and later released an edited version to iPlayer. A version which stripped of Kneecap’s chants for Palestine and their most pointed anger. By now to many Irish people this is familiar choreography. A dance the BBC has been perfecting for decades.

Despite this, Britain's population have been increasingly fascinated with modern Irish culture. Paul Mescal, Cillian Murphy, Sally Rooney, Fontaines DC, Guinness, Beamish, JW Anderson, Simone Rocha, Sharon Horgan and many more have all charmed British audiences. The Guardian has written about this ‘green wave’, as has The Times, The Observer, The Economist, Time Out, (seemingly every podcast in the UK has covered it) as well as British GQ and Irish writer Naoise Dolan. British people are drinking our drinks and eating Spice Bags. Britain comfortably consumes the black and white aesthetic of Irishness stripped of historical context, yet balks when confronted with the truth of what it means to be Irish. 

Our bigger neighbours still struggle with Irish cultural autonomy, reverting to old habits of erasure or commodification.Which brings us back to CMAT, while she’s not accusing the BBC of censorship in regards to the cutting of her melancholic gaeilge, it has echoes of the past baked into it. Sure no one’s going on strike for her song. But it’s just another in a long list of slights against our nation that have by chance happened adjacently to the BBC. However inadvertent and accidental they may be.