Film Review: The Wind that Shakes the Barley

I went to see The Wind That Shakes the Barley on Saturday night. It's a new film about the Irish War of Independence and Civil War, director by Ken Loach -- an avowedly socialist British film director. The film was very balanced, which is quite an achievement. Early press reports said the film was biased against the IRA faction that supported the Anglo-Irish treaty of 1921, which set up the Irish state and who prevailed in the subsequent civil war against their former comrades. But in fact, the pro-Treaty IRA are presented as pragmatists who compromise their ideals to come to terms with the delicate balance between the British government, Irish property-owners, Irish employers and the Irish electorate. Isn't that what politicians do? And where would a democratic society be without politicians? The anti-Treaty side are presented as being both idealistic and reckless. Loach also presents them as being motivated by concern for the poor, who wouldn't wouldn't benefit from a conservative revolution, which would have been "different flag, same bosses." The reality is that the Irish War of Independence didn’t solve the problem of grinding poverty, high unemployment, the lack of access to education and a poor public health system. I don't think that anybody would dispute that. Previous films about the Irish War of Independence – such as Shake Hands with the Devil and Michael Collins – were mostly interested in the political angle, presenting villainous British soldiers fighting heroic Irish guerrillas. Which is fair enough, because by all accounts the British military and Black and Tans were fairly villainous. When it came to the Civil War, Michael Collins and Shake Hands with the Devil presented the anti-treaty IRA as the bad guy fanatics. As a socialist, you would expect Loach to have a social angle to his films, which fortunately wasn't too heavyhanded. At the Cannes film festival, where it won the Palme D'Or, Irish arts minister John O’Donoghue scored political points by suggesting that the political descendents of the pro-treaty faction (Fine Gael) wouldn’t like the film and suggested that the political descendents of the anti-treaty faction (his own Fianna Fail) were justly presented as socialist men of principal, intent on changing more than just the colour of the flag. Um, maybe. Certainly O’Donoghue – who was demoted from justice minister when he was found to be using his chauffeured Mercedes to drive around the country at a speed that held the law in arrogant contempt – is a pretty hairy socialist or agent-of-social-equality. O'Donoghue's historical perspective is also pretty skewed. The pro-treaty faction couldn’t afford to introduce sweeping social legislation, because they had to commit all of their resources to fighting a civil war against a faction which had lost a number of general elections and Dail votes, but which had decided to ignore the results. When the war was over the pro-Treaty group had to repair the bridges, roads and public buildings that were destroyed during the Civil War. Political principles can be expensive for everybody involved. Nor can you take it for granted that a socialist or New Deal initiative was what was needed in Ireland. When the anti-Treaty faction were elected to government in the 1930s they had a chance to implement their reform policies. Their protectionist and isolationist policies wrecked the economy, increased unemployment and poverty. Their economic ideology -- which idealised the life of the traditional Irish peasant -- was abandoned in the 1960s when Fianna Fail adopted nakedly capitalist policies in an attempt to attract foreign investment. For the record, it worked pretty well. But it wasn't what the anti-treaty faction had in mind, so what exactly was John O'Donoghue's point?