Forever in Their Hearts

JUST PRIOR TO THEIR MOVE from Dublin to London a few years ago, the members of the Irish rock band Fontaines D.C. came across a newspaper story about Margaret Keane, a woman who was born in Ireland but lived in Coventry, England, for most of her life before her death in 2018. Keane’s family wanted her gravestone to carry the Gaelic inscription “In ár gCroíthe go deo” (“in our hearts forever”). However the Church of England denied the request, arguing that the phrase could be viewed as political. To Fon taines D.C. singer and songwriter Grian Chatten, the incident was like staring down the barrel of a gun given the tensions between the Irish and British that have lasted for centuries. “We were just about to move to a country that regarded Irishness in and of itself as a political statement,” he tells “There’s not a differentiation between an expression of Irish culture and it being linked to terrorism or perceived as terrorism. That was a bit shocking and upsetting.”