In Crumlin, a hip-hop collective makes grievance and gratitude rhyme

Walking past the large stone sign at the entrance to Crumlin’s Éamonn Ceannt Park, rapper and producer Michael Ward, who goes by Mickzart, takes a sip of his coffee.

“Do you practice gratitude?” he says. “It’s so important.”

 “Every night, I think, ‘That was a nice coffee earlier’, or ‘That was a nice chat I had at lunch’,” he says. “I pick even just three things to be thankful for – it’s great for the head.”

Just then, looking around the park, plotting the route for his stroll, he gestures to the stone sign and says he doesn’t know how or when it became known as Éamonn Ceannt Park. “Because growing up, this was always Sundrive Park – to my nanny, my ma, my mates.”

He first heard it referred to as Éamonn Ceannt Park on a Facebook advertisement for yoga classes in the park.

It’s emblematic of a creeping gentrification, he says, as Kimmage seems to widen itself into what he would have always known as Crumlin.

It’s something he pokes fun at on his self-produced track, “Kimmage Café”, that features a spoken-word interaction between a Crumlin local and a hyper-posh Kimmage barista.

That juxtaposition of gratitude and grievance is central to the life that Ward has been carving out for himself in music these past five or six years.

His personal outlook is optimistic, while his musical output is drenched in realism and experience.

Along with his wider collective, D12 Incorporated, he has built a catalogue of tracks, released albums, collaborated, and developed as a writer, rapper and producer.

Gone is the hardman shtick, the macho bravado once associated with hip hop, he says. “We’re after something true.”

“Why did all my mates have to pack it up and leave? Why are Palestinians unfairly left to grieve? Why’s the government hiding tricks up their sleeves? Too many homeless, while they’ve vacant properties,” Ward raps on his track “Why???”, among a list of other modern frustrations.

Across the collective’s work, themes of social injustice collide with humour and self-examination – all wrapped up in a DIY punk ethos.

On Wednesday, he and D12 Inc. comrade Kevin Collins, also known as Kadillac, released a new video for their track “The Joy in Your Eyes” – which first featured on their 2024 collaborative LP, Custard Cream Dreams.

It’s the latest in a long list of past and future projects for the D12 Inc crew, who Ward contends were brought together through some spiritual connection.

For him, hip hop has been about more than just the finished track.

It’s about the people who gather around it – friends who encourage you to finish that stray verse, collaborators who help shape a sound, a filmmaker who gives a song its own visual world, and the fans who turn up, listen closely and carry the music onward.

As fate would have it

Recently turned 30, Ward recalls being almost embarrassed to admit he was so into rap music – and wouldn’t have dared rapping publicly, especially in his own accent, he says.

But, in first year of secondary school, he noticed a classmate of his, Cameron Steele, shared a song by Brooklyn rap legend Nas.

“I was like, ‘You listen to Nas?’”, he says. “And then that was it, I feel like we just had this mad instant connection.”

Soon after, Mitchell Manning, who also goes by Absentee, entered the fold, and the first seeds of D12 Incorporated were planted. “There was just something really magical about it, bro. It's hard to really quantify it.”

After school, when they all started down different paths, music would keep bringing them back together.

One Christmas, Ward’s mother gifted him a vinyl record. “It was some random New York DJ, but he had made this mix of a lot of the underground beats at the time.”

He soon found himself in the side room of Manning’s grandparents’ house, where they would read and listen to vinyl records themselves.

“But we go in there and stick the New York record on and I remember it was just the two of us, man, and we just tried to freestyle and rap, and we were both shiiite, bro,” he says.

“But it was one of those things where we enjoyed it so much, we're like, ‘Let's do this again,’” he says.

Ward says that hearing the Irish rapper Paul Alwright/Lethal Dialect, for the first time was particularly powerful.

One of his friends played him on a bus, and hearing a Dublin accent tackling rap in an exciting, original way cemented in his own mind that great Dublin rap was not only possible, but it’s what he wanted to dedicate himself to.

Ward pays tribute to Alwright on his 2026 One for the Heads album, made along with producer Willhouse, on the aptly titled track “Lethal Dialect”.

“Gemma Dunleavy was a massive influence with that too,” he says.

Today, the D12 Incorporated collective has expanded to include Ward, Collins, Manning, Curtis Roache, Ronn Mapwata (Nonchalant), Daniel Edewor, and Cameron Steele (Cam).

Although they all grew up close geographically, a lot of them didn’t know each other until their passion for rap drew them together, Ward says.

Like unlocking characters on a video game

Collins messaged Ward out of the blue around five years ago after hearing a recording he had produced.

Ward was on a nine-month stint living in Berlin at the time. “We became pen pals.”

“We’d send each other tracks and ideas, and when I was back home, we had to meet,” he says.

When Collins arrived at the Vision Lab recording studio in Dublin 12 to meet the lads, Ward was stunned to learn Collins and Steele had been close friends in primary school – but had since fallen out of touch.

Another time, when Ward was in a coffee shop chatting about music, the guy behind the counter mentioned there was another lad in the shop who was also into music.

Turns out it was rapper Curtis Roache, who asked Ward if Vision Lab was any good, which Ward answered in the affirmative.

Roache started booking himself sessions, but was so private about it, he would press record himself in the main room and run into the booth to rap his vocal.

Eventually, Ward invited him to one of the D12 Inc studio sessions, after hearing that Roache had played a storming set at an open mic night organised by Vision Lab.

When a shy, quiet Roache went into the vocal booth and started rapping, the lads in the main room started falling around with giddy excitement at what they heard, Ward says.

Roache wasn’t sure if their reaction was a negative or positive one from the other side of the glass, Ward recalls. But there was no doubt, they were extremely impressed.

“When he came out, we were jumping and hugging him and all, and he was pretty much inducted from there,” he says.

The crew of lads, who grew up a stone’s throw from each other but were mostly strangers, slowly found each other.

It was one of life’s great blessings, that he continues to be consciously grateful for every day, he says.

“Like we all knew a lot of the same people, but we never heard of each other or we never met each other, and it was a real weird thing,” he says. “We all decided to take the dive together.”

Ward describes it as unlocking characters on a video game, the further along you play.

“You know like playing Tekken, and some of the characters are blacked out on the selection screen at first,” he says.

It’s as if each musician had to take their own first leap into the world before they could “unlock” one another, he says.

Sticking together

Collins remembers thinking rap was for “head cases or people who were doing it as like a joke”.

On a Post Leaving Certificate course in Sallynoggin, he found there were three other rappers in the college, which finally made him curious enough to try it himself.

He bought a microphone and an audio interface to record on his computer at home with in 2019.

At first, he was sampling beats from YouTube but soon realised that he couldn’t afford to pay for rights to use them.

“I was like ‘If ever I want to use these I'm going to have to pay someone' and I had no money at the time. So, I was like ‘Right, I need to start learning how to make my own beats’,” he said.

It wasn’t until months into the pandemic, when he had exhausted all other possible hobbies, that he really went down the production rabbit hole.

In those dreary pandemic days and nights, he found his voice.

A voice he uses to now confront misogyny, where much of hip hop’s past had leaned into it.

On “The Joy in Your Eyes”, the song for which the new video was released on Wednesday, he raps:

“Focus on me, myself and I // not the man I should be, but lord, I try // Trying to be a soldier but giving a woman a black eye? That’ll never be me // I was raised by queens; kings only ever shattered my dreams”.

It was a lyric that came to him after hearing about the 2022 assault of Natasha O’Brien by then-soldier Cathal Crotty.

Collins shares the same outlook of conscious gratitude as Ward, he says.

Had he not met Ward, he says there is no way he would have had the confidence to keep going with music.

“I say it to him all the time, I wouldn't be rapping if it wasn't for Mick,” he says. “Because there's been 1,000 times I just feel ‘I’m shite’ or ‘I couldn’t be arsed with this’, and Mick is like, ‘Keep going, bro, keep going, you’re great,’” Collins says.

The members of D12 Incorporated have the collectivist attitude that a rising tide lifts all boats, Ward and Collins both agree.

When Collins applied for a slot at the industry showcase Ireland Music Week, he was thrilled to be accepted.

But, was sure to share the moment with his D12 companions, who joined him on stage during his set.

Not everyone who seeks out a musical tribe is lucky enough to find one, he says. It’s a great gift that he never takes for granted, he says.

Although the musical path can be filled with frustrations and disappointment, having mates to share it with, and laugh it off with, can be just the drive needed to keep going, Collins says.

"The Joy in Your Eyes"

So, having recorded a lot of more music between them since 2024’s Custard Cream Dreams album, why are they now releasing a video for a song, “The Joy in Your Eyes”, from that record?

It was another gift that landed at their door, Ward says.

James Flynn, a film student at IADT, met Ward and Collins through working on the YouTube interview series The Slant.

On the journey home, he listened to their album and was struck by its lyrics, humour and emotional grit, he says.

He felt the pair’s music was “sincere and rooted in what mattered to them” and decided that that particular track was one he wanted to bring to the screen.

The artists’ personalities were part of the appeal, he says.

Mick’s energy and Kadillac’s relaxed presence made them a perfect pair to work with.

He approached them with the idea, then developed a storyboard and gathered a crew.

The production was modest in budget but generous in people’s effort – classmates volunteered, and the team organised equipment, a location and food for the shoot.

Flynn remembers Ward and Collins as open to whatever the day brought, full of good energy and constantly appreciative and thankful of the work happening around them.

“No matter what we brought to them, they were just constantly like, ‘Thank youse’ and ‘Appreciate it’, and it felt like they were having a good time, which made our job easier,” he says.

At the end of the video, once the track itself ends, Flynn leaves in some b-roll footage of the pair mucking about.

In that few seconds, he says, Ward's bouncy enthusiasm and Collins’ peaceful, chilled nature are made clear to the viewer – they’re not acting, that is just who they are.

A beautiful scene

The future of D12 Incorporated and Dublin hip hop in general is looking bright and colourful, says Liam O’Reilly, a massive rap fan who runs the Liamo’s Records Instagram page.

He was hooked on a song called “Blue” by Irish artists Odd Numbers and Wallfella and so had been keeping an eye on what Wallfella was up to.

“He was featured on 'Red Brick Blue Sky' from Mick and Kev’s album [Custard Cream Dreams], and that’s how I found the two boys,” he says.

“It's all authentic, they're not like trying to be any anything they're not,” he says. “You can hear they love making the music. They’re just sound lads who believe in what they’re doing.”

As a fan, O’Reilly has become a familiar face on the hip-hop live scene, says Ward. “You’d be buzzing to see him coming.”

Ward says O’Reilly, still in college, has been so encouraging to him and the whole scene – and as well as using social media to promote the Irish rap he loves, shows up at all sorts of gigs, often bringing some friends along to help spread the word.

“But it is that thing; it's almost like a little secret world,” says Ward.

O’Reilly says it feels like a special time to be an Irish hip-hop fan.

Noel Gallagher has spoken publicly about the time in Oasis’ early career, before they made it huge, when the band and their audience were at the same place in their lives and how special that connection was.

Says O’Reilly, that’s what a Dublin hip-hop gig feels like now.

“There's no divide between the artists and the people that have come to watch,” he says. “It's all just kind of one big group of people, there's no hierarchy there or anything.”

He says he regularly looks around at gigs, regardless of the act playing, and sees the faces of other well-respected rappers in the crowd, mixed with his own friends, or new friends he’s met through the scene.

“And everyone is getting along, nobody’s out of place, everybody kind of belongs, you know? It’s really, really nice,” O’Reilly says.

When talking about O’Reilly, Ward reaches for that notion again – gratitude.

That collectivist spirit flows through the scene, despite the array of artists, rappers, producers out there, there is a sense of “all in it together”, Ward says.

Funded by the Local Democracy Reporting Scheme.