A film, not a history

Rating: 7/10 (1 October 2006)

"Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow" wrote James Joyce. Well, a lot of us Irish piglets have managed to escape the maternal jaws and prosper abroad. A film like this, on the Irish war of independence (1919-21) and the even bloodier civil war which followed it (1922-23), is thus both remote and yet oddly personal. Ken Loach's take on these battles, forgotten in Britain but well remembered in Ireland, is not even-handed, but he is a movie maker, and a very good one, not an historian.
The central character played convincingly by Cillian Murphy is Damien, rather improbably a medical graduate from a village near Cork, who is about to go off to work in a leading London Hospital. He is persuaded to stay and joint the local IRA column commanded by his brother Teddy after witnessing a couple of petty atrocities committed by the British forces, the Black and Tans. The IRA steal weapons from Army depots, ambush British columns, shoot informers, and bring down on the general population reprisals which have a ferocity which far outweighs the IRA's mayhem. The population, having had enough, vote in favour of a peace treaty, which excludes Northern Ireland from the new Irish State, but the hard men of the IRA, some of them socialists as well as Nationalists, go on fighting, this time against some of their own former comrades, in Daniel's case against his own brother.
Ken Loach tells his story simply and vividly, with not a surplus scene, though he allows some of his characters lengthy and didactic speeches. He goes for authenticity in the lighting, which means greens and browns dominate almost every scene. (We could have done with some sub-titles  the soft Cork accents are difficult even for another Irishman to hear.) His characters, though, tend to be types rather than people, Damien the idealist, Teddy the pragmatist  they are not rounded out characters but vehicles for the argument. What Loach does get across (though I am not sure he intended to) is the inevitability of the tragedy of the civil war.
The pro-treaty party won the civil war, but nearly a century later the dispute remains alive. Ironically, the South is now ridiculously prosperous while the North still languishes economically. Ironically also, parts of the anti-treaty party (Fianna Fail) under Eamon de Valera survived to become a dominant force in Southern Irish politics. Loach's account of the 1920-22 period is both a clear statement of the issues and an evocation of how it must have felt to have been involved. We Piglets can feel what our grandparents must have felt when the IRA and the Black and Tans came by.