For Jeanitta McCabe, the word kneecap conjures not a rap trio on stage but a memory that plays in her head, unspooling again and again in a loop.
It is the night of 13 September 1990 and she is a 10-year-old at home in bed in Newry, County Down, when Northern Ireland’s Troubles come barrelling through the family’s front door.
Six to eight men in masks storm into the two-storey council house and march her father, Peter, into the kitchen. One places a pistol against his leg, just above the knee.
Jeanitta remains in her darkened bedroom upstairs with siblings – her mother is on the landing holding the door, corralling the children for their own safety – but she can hear the shrieks of a sister who is downstairs and the shouts of the IRA intruders.
Then she hears bangs, like a door slamming. Then silence. After an interval – seconds, minutes, she is not sure – she is able to open the door and joins her mother at the top of the stairs. Her father is at the bottom of the stairs lying in a pool of blood. “Throw me a towel,” he shouts to her mother. “Don’t let the children see me.”
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.
“What happened to daddy is still alive to this day. I feel trapped inside my own mind, of still being that 10-year-old child,” Jeanitta, now 45 said this week. “That unsettlement has never left me.”
Republican and loyalist paramilitaries inflicted more than 6,000 punishment shootings and beatings from 1973, when reporting began, according to police figures, but scholars estimate the real figure is between 10,000 and 20,000. The practice tapered off after the 1998 Good Friday agreement but incidents still occur.
Most of the victims were alleged petty criminals such as drug dealers and car thieves – hoods, in Northern Ireland parlance – who were targeted by the Irish Republican Army, Ulster Volunteer Force and other groups in the guise of policing their own communities.
It was the one of the most pervasive forms of violence, said Liam Kennedy, a Queen’s University Belfast historian who documented the phenomenon. “The astonishing thing, apart from the silence round these practices, is that this was green-on-green and orange-on-orange violence, perpetrated by those who had set themselves up as defenders of their community.”
Victims typically were teenage boys or young men who were escorted to alleyways or wasteground – some turned up by appointment – to be shot or bludgeoned in the ankles, wrists or knees. To have all those joints targeted was called a “six-pack”. Some lost limbs; some died.
For the IRA, it was a way to challenge the legitimacy of the British state and usurp its justice system, said Kieran McEvoy, an expert on transitional and restorative justice at Queen’s university. “It was brutal, visible and popular. There was a demand for it.”
The rap group Kneecap has subverted the term by adopting the personas of hoods who celebrate drug-taking and mock paramilitaries as well as state authority. They embody gleeful defiance for a generation that views the Troubles as history.
For many families affected by punishment violence, however, the page never turned. Other victims of the Troubles are routinely commemorated but people who were kneecapped are largely overlooked.
“There is stigma attached to victims of these attacks, some of whom become outsiders and are shunned in their home localities,” said 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.
Illness prevented Peter granting an interview but Jeanitta, speaking from her home near Newry, recalled the attack and aftermath. The reason for the assault remains unclear. Her father was a diesel mechanic with traffic convictions but had no criminal record and it was unusual for the IRA to kneecap someone in their own home, said Jeanitta.
The attackers gave him 24 hours to leave Northern Ireland so Peter discharged himself from hospital and with a bandaged leg drove his wife and seven children to the ferry. For five years the family were nomads, roving bed and breakfasts across England and Scotland and making fleeting visits to Northern Ireland.
Jeanitta was 15 when they settled again in Newry but she felt an outcast. “On my first day back at school a girl from a republican family stood up and said ‘youse aren’t supposed to be in the country, your daddy’s a tout [informer]’.”
Jeanitta would stay up all night with her father, who would sit on a sofa with an iron bar and a fire extinguisher, fearing another attack. “We’d be there until daylight. In my mind if I stayed with him I could stop it happening again.”
She married and has children but has been diagnosed with anxiety, depression, fibromyalgia and other conditions that she attributes to trauma and enduring stigma. “The legacy never leaves. To this day our name is absolute dirt.”
She dislikes Kneecap’s use of balaclavas, which remind her of the attack, but otherwise has no opinion of the rap group. “I don’t watch the news or go out of the house a lot. I have isolated myself. I don’t know how to live in that world out there. This is my world, within my own walls.”
