IRELAND’S SOCIALIST TRADITION COMES ALIVE IN THE WIND THAT SHAKES THE BARLEY
The Wind That Shakes the Barley is a fictional story about some of the last years of the Irish struggle for independence. Teddy O’Donovan (played by Pedraic Delaney), an organizer of a guerrilla group in a small town far from Dublin, asks his younger brother Damien (played by Cillian Murphy), a physician, to abandon his plans to complete his residency in London in order to join the Irish Republican Army. However, as Damien says goodbye to his family, British mercenaries (the Black and Tans) assigned to suppress the independence movement make an appearance, declare that all public meetings and games are banned, and Damien is appropriately converted to the IRA cause. Indeed, much of the film establishes the rationale for independence through episodes of overbearing British, who look down on the Irish, tear out fingernails to extract intelligence, and even rough up Irish women in retaliation for their cooperation with the IRA. The subliminal reference to the way Americans have violated Iraq is unmistakable. Always keenly aware of the interaction between social classes in his movies, director Ken Loach (Political Film Society nominee for the 2001 film Bread and Roses) at one point illustrates the dilemma of an IRA eager for funds from rich Irish and an Irish court that metes out justice to a poor woman who is being ripped off by a rich moneylender, the first time when radicalized Damien differs from pragmatic Teddy. The struggle, of course, takes place during the time when Britain is involved in World War I. At the conclusion of the war, when several Eastern European states are carved out of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, London offers the Irish a peace treaty. According to the terms, which voters ratify in a referendum during 1921 without having even a day to read the fine print, an Irish Free State is to become a dominion in the British Empire. Although the IRA has sworn to establish a republic, not to swear loyalty to the King, pragmatist Teddy favors the arrangement, which he suggests could later be changed, while Damien objects that the new Irish Free State will simply become another instrument to oppress the poor, since British owners of Irish lands will have their property rights respected. Damien rejoins his IRA colleagues to launch a civil war, and soon Irish Free State troops round him up as a traitor to Ireland. (Once again, a parallel with Iraq’s civil war may occur to filmviewers.) Teddy then must contemplate whether to give the order to execute his own brother, just as he ordered the deaths of Irish who collaborated with the English in years past. When the film ends, he has made his decision. Missing at the end are titles for filmviewers who may want to know the outcome of the civil war, which lasted until 1923, and the fact that Ireland finally became a republic in 1949. The title comes from a traditional song about “foreign chains that bind us.” Loach has not only been excoriated by right-wing British elements for producing a pro-IRA film, but even the leftist London daily Guardian notes dismissively that not all IRA members were socialists. The film has been nominated for a Political Film Society award as best film exposé of 2007. MH