There’s a lot to say about “The Wind that Shakes the Barley.” I’d really like to see it again. It won the Palme d’Or at Cannes last year.

Set in County Cork in 1920, the film opens with a spirited hurling match among a group of young men. Later, they are confronted by a patrol of Black and Tans (mercenary British soldiers paid £1 a day to stamp out the Irish independence movement. These guys were WWI vets who viewed the 1916 Easter Rising as an act of serious betrayal and wanted to knock some heads in retaliation).
The soldiers are loud and abusive, shouting for names and information from the men and women gathered outside a simple cottage. Everyone complies except for Micheál (pronounced Mee-hull in Irish) who insists on speaking his own language. He’s taken into the barn and killed.
Damien (Cillian Murphy) is a young doctor slated to work in a London hospital. Though he refused to join the IRA after the wake, he does so after witnessing the Black and Tans at the train station administer more beatings when the conductor refuses to carry the soldiers. (There was indeed a Railway Worker’s Strike in 1920 by men who refused to transport the soldiers). Damien casts his lot with the local flying column of rebels and begins to train to conduct guerilla warfare. His brother Teddy is in charge and later supports the Free State in a classic depiction of Civil War rendering brothers into political enemies.
The plot continues through the War for Independence, The Anglo-Irish Treaty, and onto the Irish Civil War. That’s a great deal of history to pack into one film, but the director Ken Loach and screenwriter Paul Laverty offer much perspective and scope to the landmarks in modern Irish history.

I’d like to focus on two scenes that treat the republican legacy, turn to how women appear in the film, and then address how the film has been received.

The first scene that really delves into actual Irish republican politics apart from the popular agrarian uprising is set in the prison cell when Damien recognizes the train conductor who had defied the soldiers and was beaten in return. He shares a cigarette with Dan (Liam Cunningham) and the two join in reciting a popular quote by James Connolly. I never thought I’d hear him being quoted in a film. I’d like to digress and discuss the quote, because it first appeared in the Belfast monthly journal “The Shan Van Vocht”(Poor Old Woman) in January of 1897. I have a copy of the entire archive, which ran from 1896-1899, published by Alice Milligan and Anna Johnston. I discuss it in the second chapter of my dissertation. Connolly published his first work on the national question in that journal. The essay was published in the column “Other People’s Opinions” and was titled “Nationalism and Socialism.”
Anyway, I checked the archive today and here is the full quote that the men recite in the jail cell:

“If you remove the English army to-morrow and hoist the green flag over Dublin Castle, unless you set about the organisation of the Socialist Republic, your efforts would be in vain. England will still rule you; she will rule you through her capitalists, through her landlords, through her financiers, through her usurers, through the whole array of commercial and individualist institutions she has planted in this country and watered with the tears of our mothers and the blood of our martyrs.”

Damien and Dan are committed to the idea of social revolution that extends into the real material conditions of everyday life. They want more than an end to the colonial condition. In the dim enclosure of the cell the men unite ideologically, and Dan tells him that he was in the Irish Citizen Army (formed in 1914 by Connolly) and heard the man speak. This scene is important because it establishes the men as thoughtful and reflective beyond the knee-jerk version of Anglophobia. Their IRA membership is not simply about revenge for the Black and Tan’s violence. They have a vision for their country and the colonial condition is just one obstacle. Whether or not you agree with their Socialist politics it seems clear that the men are students of history.

The second scene among the republicans that stands out is the tense meeting to weigh the merits of the Anglo-Irish Treaty that Michael Collins brought back from London. It would establish an Irish Free State. Ireland was to be a dominion within the United Kingdom, and this required an oath of loyalty to the crown, and the partition of six counties in the North. This was not an easy negotiation between nationalists. The pro-Treaty contingent led by Teddy is persuasive and pragmatic. If they don’t accept the treaty, Lloyd George promises a brutal invasion and subsequent war for which the Irish have little hope of winning. This is a stirring ensemble piece where the many different characters get to speak, including the women (more on that later). Loach uses natural light throughout the film, which lends every scene a warm verisimilitude and sense of immediacy. It’s cozy in that room and you can feel the intimacy among friends who cannot reconcile this divide between idealism and pragmatism. Damien and Dan argue that they cannot abandon the commitment to Irish independence for all the entire nation/land/people which they voted for in 1919. Dan says if you take the treaty then you’ll only change the accent of the men in charge and the colors on the flag, but nothing else. Everyone speaks with passion, but it’s not the shout fest that we see in Jordan’s “Michael Collins.”

“The Wind that Shakes the Barley” impressed me by finally putting some women in the republican movement. Granted, only one woman has a significant role, but we see women for the first time doing more than making tea and waiting by the fire to comfort men. I’ll take it. It’s a start. The primary woman in the film, Sinead (Orla Fitzgerald) breaks the cinematic stereotype for women. She’s a member of Sinn Fein running the local council committee to resolve disputes, rather like a people’s court. She faces down the soldier’s violence as bravely as any man; she runs guns and messages at great risk to her personal life. Yes, she develops a romantic relationship with Damien, but it’s not like Julia Robert’s role as Kitty in “Michael Collins”. Sinead’s romance is only part of her life. It’s not her sole reason to exist. In one gruesome scene during a raid on her house, the Tans hold her down and cut out chunks of her scalp and hair. Her head is a bloody ravaged mess, but she bears it, and says nothing. She’s a full agent in the organization and the men all respond to her as a comrade.
There are two other women on the Dáil along with Sinead, though I’m not sure of their names. They tell a prosperous merchant that he must repay a poor old woman that he lent money to at a 500% interest rate. They denounce his greed and exploitation. Teddy walks the man out to the pub to waive the court’s decision, and one woman shouts the men back in from the street. It’s a great scene where gender privilege among male nationalists gets called on the carpet. Women hold the rule of law that protects the poor. Teddy insists that they should ignore the law so that they can get money from the merchant to buy guns. He could care less about the penniless widow. Damien and Dan support the women and argue that if they abandon principle, again they’ll be just like the men in the system they are working to escape. I’d also like to point out that James Connolly was a feminist, called Irish women “the slaves of slaves” and invited women to join the ICA in 1914. Women such as Constance Markievicz, Helena Molony, Dr. Kathleen Lynn, Madeline ffrench-Mullen, Julia Grenan, Máire Nic Shiubhlaigh, Winifred Carney, and Margaret Skinnider joined up to train and fight/work beside men during Easter Week.
Damien and Dan continue the tradition of nationalist men who viewed women as essential human beings to the life of the nation.

Loach does not spare the Free State forces, and depicts them as replicating colonial violence. They did. During the War of Independence the colonial forces put 300 women in jail. Yet during the Civil War, the Free State put 2,000 women in jail. Women who refused the treaty were painted as bloodthirsty harpies, harridans, and hags in the press. Militant women were deemed an aberration in a way that men were not. Conservative nationalists like de Valera and Kevin O’Higgins pushed women out of public life and into a symbolic role as mother and wife.

This is getting long-winded, but I have spent the last two years researching women in the Irish anticolonial movement, so there you have it. I don’t blame the contingent who wanted to accept the Treaty and just maybe get a little freaking peace after all. The Treaty was realistically all they were going to get at the time. But it would be reductive and simplistic to say that the idealistic call for a united Ireland failed to hold moral or ethical appeal.

Finally, I looked only briefly at some reviews, but this one by Eric Lurio at the "Greenwich Village Gazette" seems fairly representative of critics who reduce republicanism in 1920 to terrorism. It always puzzles me why people will endorse every other independence movement throughout history except for the Irish one. I guess George Washington was a terrorist as well. Laverty and Loach conducted painstaking research for the film, and if anything showed restraint in their portrayal of the soldier’s use of torture and violence.
Go see it.