Will peace ever overcome in Ireland?

Rating: 9/10 (7 November 2006)

To speak today of the Ireland of the 1920s is always a very difficult matter because it contains a compromise that divided the victors even before it was implemented, a divide along the line that opposed the nationalists who wanted to fight to the finish and the politicians who wanted to make do with what they had gotten and trust the future for the rest. Both were right and both were wrong and the film shows this impossible dilemma through two brothers, through a small community in a small village. Poignant because brothers and sisters are on both sides and they have to fight against their own blood. Yet the film is a lot deeper and stronger than that. We all knew wars were not only inhuman but anti-human. But the film has just been made and it is a reflection on what is happening in Northern Ireland today. The compromise was wrong because it cut Ireland in two and a new war was to come out of this situation and the solution to this new war is a lot more difficult to find. And this time the divide crosses protestant families as well as catholic ones. And peace is inescapable, hence a compromise is historically unavoidable and any compromise will be both temporary and unstable, but also a stone on which to climb up a little bit higher later on. The compromise was right too just for that reason: it enabled the Irish to get in business in Ireland and to sort out and rule their own concerns, which eventually made them both a lot stronger and entirely independent. On one side the nationalists believed that history had to be made by human action and they were afraid of any regression later on. On the other side the reformists believed that history was going at its own speed and that it could not be forced. On one side those who were deeply influenced by leninism. On the other side those who were for a liberal, capitalistic world. On one hand the working class. On the other the business people. And that's where Ken Loach becomes brilliant. He does not push us in any direction. He shows the human or man-made mostly horrific side of things and he let us draw our own lines and conclusions, knowing that history cannot be rewritten and that the future is what history will make it, not us, not our necessary decisions, not our indispensable actions. Decisions and actions will have to go the way history is going. And who knows for sure where it is going? Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University of Paris Dauphine & University of Paris I Pantheon-Sorbonne