Guardian
Ken Loach’s last film about the Troubles won a Cannes prize and sparked a furore. Now he’s back representing Britain at this year’s festival - with a film about the IRA’s birth that’s set to trigger an even greater row. He talks to Fiachra Gibbons
Wednesday May 17, 2006
The Guardian
Even before its official premiere at this week’s Cannes film festival, Ken Loach was raising hackles with The Wind That Shakes the Barley. “Is this the most IRA film ever?” one critic asked after an early screening. “Were the British really that bad?” chipped in another, clearly shaken. “Gerry Adams is going to love this - what the hell did Loach think he was doing?”
For Loach, this is dangerous talk. His last film about Ireland, the claustrophobic political thriller Hidden Agenda, was branded the “official IRA entry” to Cannes in 1990 and provoked the mother of all censorship battles, with journalists - never mind Tory MPs - calling for it to be banned. Its plot, which suggested that elements of the security services were waging an illegal war in Northern Ireland, was condemned as wrongheaded at best, and treachery at worst. Despite the furore, Hidden Agenda won the Cannes Jury prize and revived Loach’s international career. And now we know from the Pat Finucane case, among others, that a secret dirty war was indeed being fought.
This year, The Wind That Shakes the Barley is the big British hope in the main competition at Cannes - and its politics are, if anything, more open to misunderstanding and manipulation. Loach, though, is confident he will once again be proved correct. As he told me last week: “I have my sleeves rolled up and I am ready.”
He will need to be. Any film-maker who strays into this territory invariably gets dragged down the barracks first for a good ideological kicking. Neil Jordan’s Michael Collins was found wanting in the minutiae of its historical detail while In the Name of the Father was pilloried for taking liberties with courtroom protocol. Historical licence is rigidly policed in films about Ireland, lest the past provide - as it inevitably does - ammunition in the battles still being waged in Belfast.
It’s because of this that Loach’s film, written by Paul Laverty, seeks to steer clear of recognisable figures. Instead, it depicts a typically Loachian collective struggle: an IRA “flying column” of young farm labourers, shopkeepers and workers who take to the hills during Ireland’s war of independence to fight the locally recruited Royal Irish Constabulary and later the Black and Tans, the British army irregulars drafted from traumatised survivors of the trenches. The group’s efforts to make a better world through revolution, however, are undermined from within and without: the column turns on itself in the vicious civil war that follows the signing of the 1921 treaty that left a quarter of the country still in British hands.
Although he has taken pains to avoid obvious factual mantraps, Loach was adamant he would not be cowed by the weight of recent history. He shows these men - and the women who support them - as idealists fighting for a just cause, from whom today’s semi-retired Provos claim direct lineage.
The day I met him, on set in west Cork, Loach was labouring under the threat of an impending storm and a migraine attack that seemed an augur of headaches to come. So why not let sleeping dogs lie? “The war is over, so why shouldn’t we make a film about this pivotal part of our shared history?” he says. “But even if it wasn’t, I don’t think you can say these events are off-limits because parallels might be drawn that are inconvenient for us now.
“Our story tries to be as clear-eyed as it can be. Obviously it is a story we don’t tell very much on this side of the water, because the British government doesn’t emerge very well from it. But it is a fantastic story, of guerilla fighters in an occupied country, with the tensions and the excitements that brings. There is a truce; a deal is done and the colonial country manipulates that deal in such a way that the people are divided. That legacy is still with us. Just because of what has happened since in Ireland, you cannot say it cannot be told or should have a health warning.”
Loach comes to this project trailing plenty of ideological tin cans of his own. He has long harboured a wish to make a film about the Irish revolution that wasn’t: how a movement set in train by the 1916 Easter Rising (led by, among others, the great socialist thinker James Connolly) could have ended up creating one of the most conservative, regressive societies in Europe.
Jim Allen, who wrote Hidden Agenda, had been working on a script around this theme, called Stolen Republic, when he died in 1999. Connolly, wounded and strapped into a chair, was executed in the 1916 Rising’s aftermath. Public opinion, which had originally been hostile to the rebels, began to switch in their favour when news leaked out. But the man most feared by the imperial authorities - as well as the conservative nationalists who would come to dominate the Irish Free State - had been removed. Connolly’s death, and the absorption of the survivors of his Irish Citizen Army into the newly formed IRA, also robbed the Irish left of the leadership and the leverage to bring about real social change.
The Wind That Shakes the Barley is a very different film to Stolen Republic, yet Connolly is still its great unseen hero. His prescience is summoned up by Liam Cunningham’s railwayman war veteran, and a young doctor played by Cillian Murphy, as enraged by the poverty he sees around him as by English oppression. Both repeat Connolly’s maxim that a revolution is a failure if it only changes the accents of the powerful.
While he was writing the script, Laverty (like Connolly, a Scot of Irish extraction) became convinced that the reason the history of this period has been obscured is because it is uncomfortable for everyone, Irish and British alike. “It was important not just to show what people were fighting against - that this was not all about getting the Brits out - but what they were fighting for,” he says. “That gets forgotten. People were fighting often for very different things. There were deep divisions between them, which could be exploited from the outside.
“I wanted this to be a much more nuanced and hopefully truer picture about how these people really were. We wanted to show, too, how democracy can be debased. The 1922 election that approved the Treaty is the basis of the Irish state. Yet the election was fought against the backdrop of the most appalling threats and bullying from the British government, who threatened ‘immediate and terrible war’ if the Treaty was not ratified. Even the constitution was not published until the morning of the election so it would be impossible to debate.
“No one,” he adds, “ever talks about the 1918 election.”
That’s not entirely true. Sinn Féin does. A lot. The 1918 election, when it almost swept the board outside the Unionist north-east, is what it claims legitimacy from. Democracy, it believes, was debased in 1922. That is why it has argued that, although it has never had more than 15% of the vote in the whole island since 1918, it is still the country’s legitimate government. In Irish politics you must always watch your enemies, but be even more careful of your friends.
So is The Wind That Shakes the Barley “an IRA film”? It is and it isn’t. It is a film about the IRA in the most heroic phase of its history, at a time when it had the overwhelming support of the Irish people - something that it has conspicuously lacked since. As such, it is unashamedly partisan. But the most devastating line in the film is delivered by someone who would normally be seen as the Loach class enemy: an Anglo-Irish landlord who berates the IRA men who kidnap him: “God preserve Ireland if you lot gain control. It will become an inward-looking, priest-infested backwater.” Which is exactly what Ireland became.
Laverty is acutely aware that the war of independence was, in many respects, a civil war, and that concepts of Britishness and Irishness were more elastic then. “The war started off against the local police before the Black and Tans were brought in. And you have to remember how many Irishmen, including republicans, fought for Britain in the first world war, and how many who opposed the IRA regarded themselves as Irishmen, and patriots even, for wanting to keep Ireland in the empire. The two countries were very tightly enmeshed.”
Loach and Laverty do not pass over painful truths. The seeds of doubt are planted early in the film when the doctor, Damien, the tragic hero of the piece, has to shoot the landlord and one of his own comrades who has been forced to become an informer, and wonders if “this Ireland we are fighting for is worth it” - a question that haunts everyone who “did their bit” in the North over the past 35 years. And the film makes it clear that it was the oath to the King - and not partition - that caused the civil war, something that northern republicans will find hard to swallow. The Wind That Shakes the Barley gives succour to no one - least of all to Gerry Adams, who could pass for Damien’s brutalised brother Teddy (a clear cypher for Michael Collins, too), whose moral compass is skewed by the exercise of power and the promise of more.
No doubt this film is Loach’s pointed riposte to the Hollywoodisation of Michael Collins - who might have become Ireland’s Franco had he not caught a stray bullet in 1922. Donal O’Driscoll, Loach’s historical advisor, accuses the Neil Jordan film of being “hamstrung by hindsight. Granted it came out at a tricky time, but its claim that Collins died trying to take the gun out of Irish politics is frankly bollocks.”
The present keeps butting into Loach’s film in other tough ways, too. It is hard to watch the killing of the young IRA man without thinking of that other IRA informer, Denis Donaldson, who was dispatched with a shotgun by killers unknown last month in a lonely cottage in the mountains where my own grandfather sought refuge when he was a member of an IRA flying column during those first Troubles. His death has been preying on Laverty’s mind, as have the parallels with the civil war brewing in Iraq, helped on by US divide and rule.
In Ireland, though, the film will be taken mostly as a stomach-churning warning about how yesterday’s freedom fighters can become tomorrow’s oppressors - a lesson that will hit home more than anywhere on the Belfast estates controlled by paramilitaries, where those who speak out are intimidated, threatened with exile or worse.
Before Loach began shooting the film, he was drawn into controversy surrounding the murder of Robert McCartney by drunken members of the IRA in Belfast. The prominence of the case, he told the BBC, was an example of “how news is spun”; Catholics murdered by loyalists, he claimed, never received such publicity. He had clearly never met the McCartneys nor their Short Strand neighbours, who are as republican as they come.
Yet Loach’s film turns on a moment when a “gombeen man” (a loan shark) is sprung from a Sinn Féin court run by justice-seeking women like the McCartneys, because the money he supplies to the IRA is seen as more important than principle. It is the point at which the flying column begins to divide, and where things begin to slide. If there are hard lessons to be taken from The Wind That Shakes the Barley, it appears even its maker has been big enough to heed them.
· The Wind That Shakes the Barley is out on June 23.
Last week I watched the first part of the RTÉ documentary about the 1981 hunger strike. I thought it very well made. It flowed easily – the result of careful editing. There were various voices heard, republican, British, unionist, prison service but all came together in a seamless hour-long programme. I was eager to see the second part of the series.
A poignant poem written by murdered teenager Michael McIlveen was a moving centrepiece at his funeral today.
