Watch | Fionntán De Brún: Kneecap made the Irish language cool for young people
Irish writer Fionntán De Brún said during a discussion at the HeadRead festival in Tallinn that a new generation in Ireland has fully embraced the Irish language, something that is now dubbed the Kneecap effect.
De Brún was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland in 1969. He is a literary historian and currently works as a professor of Irish at Maynooth University. He focuses on 20th-century Irish-language literature.
He focuses on 20th-century Irish-language literature, writes in Irish, and his recent work explores the connections between the language and his home city.
De Brún's debut novel In the "Belly of the Beast" ("Béal na Béiste") attracted considerable attention, as it addresses one of the more complex conflicts of post-Second World War Europe – the Troubles – at its height in the 1980s. At the center of the work is the relationship between a scholar who, in his youth, collaborated with the Nazis, and a young IRA freedom fighter.
"Béal na Béiste" has been translated into Estonian – "Koletise kõhus" – by Indrek Žis, who interviewed De Brún at HeadRead. The conversation touches on the history of Ireland and Northern Ireland and attitudes towards the Irish language today.
You can watch the interview on ERR News above.
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Editor: Helen Wright, Kaspar Viilup, Janno Buschmann
