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• The Wind That Shakes The Barley WINS Palme d’Or
• Reviews from Britain and Ireland

When Mairtin & I swapped a couple of emails when he told me he was going to Cannes, I was very excited. Because Ken Loach is a hero to Ireland. And he’s a hero for Britain.

The late eighties in Ireland were ugly. It was a long time since Pope John Paul II had begged on his knees in Ireland to the men of violence. And the hunger strikes and the dignity of Bobby Sands were years past.

Nobody knew the Republic would be experiencing a tiger economy in a matter of years, or that the ceasefire to end all ceasefires was on the way.

Instead Sinn Fein were gagged. On television you heard actors’ voices, if you heard anything, and public debate involving their elected representatives did not freely take place. I recall one comedy sketch which had a Sinn Fein representative being interviewed but before answering each question he would inhale helium from a balloon. (UPDATE: And HERE it is)

Talking with Sinn Fein, let alone attempting to represent their views, would bring abuse to you in heaps. John Hume was villified for talking to Gerry Adams in attempts that were ultimately to kick start the ‘peace process’ and lead to the 1994 ceasefire, and a Nobel Peace Prize for Hume

We’d been used to all kinds of obscenities when it came to violence, but the late eighties took us past so many former taboos. Memorial services and funerals were no longer off-limits. I spent a couple of those years in England, and routinely received abuse and discrimination because of my accent.

In response to the Ango-Irish Agreement of 1985 Loyalist groups killed more than Republicans but the outside world and the British all clamoured for the IRA alone to stop. Meanwhile the SAS summarily executed whoever they deemed guilty before crimes were even committed, and the RUC continued with the aid of British intelligence to wage their own war of terror.

Deputy Chief Constable John Stalker of the Greater Manchester Police was removed from his position in charge of the inquiry into the shoot-to-kill policy. And of course he was pilloried by the British press. And so the obscenity of the pretence of law and order continued.

From this mess of whispered questions came Ken Loach to make a movie. Ken Loach had an impeccable pedigree in television grounded in social realism, and had made possibly the greatest british movie ever in Kes, the story of a boy and a kestral in the working-class north of England.

Hidden Agenda dealt with Ireland and its politics when neither Ireland nor Britain would talk about Ireland and its politics, nor even allow talk about it. Frances McDormand and Brian Cox star in an excellent film about collusion between the security forces of the state and sectarian murder gangs.

Loach suffered for making this film, and yet as the ongoing controversy over the murder of Belfast lawyer Pat Finucane shows, Loach’s political thriller was always on the money.

And now Ken Loach has made a film about Ireland’s War of Independence and following Civil War. And again he gets abuse in the British press for daring to represent a view that disagreed with that of British governing.

Loach makes great films, as the British BAFTA awards recently recognized, and he does them from the ground up. Social realism might mean he does not enter the world of Frank Capra’s fantasy, but watch Kes and tell me it’s not an absolutely magical evocation of childhood, all the more so because of the realism.

For the British who don’t pay attention, they might finally learn something albeit 85 years too late. And for the Irish who revise history to say we had a Civil War over the partition of Ireland, they might be reminded that we didn’t - we had a Civil War over connections to the Crown. The Wind That Shakes The Barley is likely to tell a true tragic story of a people and those who would govern them, that we still feel the reverbarations of today.

See also:
    • US Irish Film Office, Cannes, and The Tudors
    • Irish Tax Movie Breaks Approved by EC
    • Magical Movie Music Moment

    • Articles on The Wind That Shakes The Barley
    • The BBC Shakes The Barley
    • Cillian Murphy is not Irish Actor
    • The Irish Gay Icon Who Shot Michael Collins
 

Handy Irish Phrase: Is í an dias is troime is ísle a chromas a cheann   (The heaviest ear of grain bends its head the lowest)

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 18th, 2006 at 4:56 pm and is filed under Movies. You can follow responses via my RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.