CMAT hits out at RTÉ for cutting Lankum’s Choice Prize acceptance speech over solidarity with Palestine

8 March, 2024

Lankum

CMAT has hit out at the Irish broadcaster RTÉ, after they cut Lankum’s acceptance speech at the Choice Music Prize, in which the band spoke passionately about Palestine.

The band were picking up this year’s edition of the award, which is handed out to the best album by an Irish artist. Their fourth album ‘False Lankum’ beat other contenders such as The Murder Capital, Kojaque and CMAT herself, who picked up last year’s prize for her debut album ‘If My Wife New I’d Be Dead’.

Lankum, who also won the award in 2019 for ‘The Livelong Day’, took to the stage to accept, and singer Ian Lynch used the opportunity to express solidarity with the people of Palestine and called for direct action against Israel.

RTÉ, which also sponsors the award, broadcast the speech live on RTÉ 2fm, but initially cut the speech from their podcast of the ceremony. They have since explained that this was because the automatically-generated audio file was programmed to cut off at 11:15pm, but the show overrun. They say the full audio will be available again soon.

Lynch started the speech by saying: “We’re very grateful to get this award, but to be honest, it’s really hard to see how we can celebrate it with an actual live genocide going on.”

“To be honest, every day seems more and more hopeless than the one before it and we are trying to appeal to the consciences of people who may or may not have a conscience to begin with. There’s a lot of despair out there. Maybe we can put enough pressure on the government to introduce some actual meaningful sanctions on Israel.”

He continued by suggesting potential courses of action that could be taken, including “occupations, direct action, boycotts”, imploring people to “go into the supermarket, find every Israeli product you can find, fuck it in the bin”.

“Your grandkids are gonna be sitting on your lap and they’re gonna go, ‘Nana, Granda, what did you do during the Palestine genocide?’,” he added. “And you are going to feel like an absolute prick if you can’t tell them that you did everything in your power to stop this horrendous genocide.”

“We want [the Palestinian people] to experience justice, equality, self determination, independence, and all those other basic human rights that apparently are afforded to everybody else in the world. So that’s all we have to say. Thanks for the award. Free Palestine.”

Reacting to the news that the speech had initially been cut, CMAT posted on X/Twitter: “I believe it was incredibly disrespectful of @RTE2fm to cut @LankumDublin’s winning speech out of their broadcast, in which Ian spoke so eloquently about the genocide happening in Palestine right now. So here it is again- hopefully more people hear it.”

NME spoke to CMAT at the Brit Awards last weekend, where she was nominated for International Artist of the Year.

She told us about how Kylie Minogue, who won the Brits Global Icon Award, inspired her as a child: “She is the love of my life and the most important woman. I do think we should have a religion dedicated to her,” she said. “She was omnipresent when I was growing up because I was five years old when the ‘Fever’ album came out.

“We didn’t really have any music that wasn’t the radio, I wasn’t exposed to any alternative music or anything until I was much older. So when I was exposed to the radio I think my brain really clung onto anything that was weird — and Kylie’s music is inherently quite alternative and quite strange.

She continued: “It’s structurally different, it doesn’t follow trends. Her music videos and visuals are so inspiring too because they’re so well thought out. So for me, she was just this beacon of weirdness. That’s the only way I can describe her.”

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