Paul Laverty, the film’s screenwriter spoke at a Socialist Resistance meeting last week to mark the launch of The Wind That Shakes The Barley on DVD. Here is an edited version of his remarks that will be in the next SR along with an incompetently shot video.

When you set out to write an historical film about Ireland the big problem you have is where to start. We could have done a period piece about some bureaucrat exporting food during the Famine. That would have been fascinating. It would have shown how empires and imperialism worked. Eventually we settled on the flying columns for many reasons. It’s obviously very dramatic but it also gave us a chance to try to examine different voices and to be truthful to the times.

A thing that fascinated doing the research was how young these people were. When you read the history you find yourself asking what you’d have done in these circumstances. Many of them were teenagers and if you were thirty you were an old man. Tom Barry, who led the flying columns was thirty. In 1916 he was with the British Army in Iraq when he heard about the executions of the leaders of the Easter Rising in Dublin. You have to remember how inexperienced they were and were faced with these dramatic situations and terrible decisions about life and death.

Some people thought we’d made this film in relation to the Iraqi war. We hadn’t. What was amazing though doing the research through old documents and letters is the fact that even thought the technology had changed the rhetoric was the same. The psychology of occupation was very similar. In one scene we see what some young Black and Tans do. They were sent home to the dole after fighting in the First World War. They joined the Black and Tans and were sent over to Ireland, not always knowing what was going on. Many of them were racists and they found themselves being ambushed and shot at. They had no police skills and they were sent over there to terrorise.

A thing that makes the Irish peasantry different from that in other European countries is the very strong folk memory, a sense that there is a culture that was there before the incomers came. Memory became a very powerful tool. Michael Davitt, leader of the Land League talked about his memories of his family being kicked off their farm in the 1850s and they went to Lancashire to work in the mills. He became very radical and an internationalist at a time when not many had a socialist perspective. There was a current there that was very important, even someone like Roger Casement who said that he found the Irishman in himself when he went to the Congo and he saw how Belgian imperialism was behaving in the Congo.

The small farmers were much more socially conservative than farm labourers or apprentices. There were massively different interests. In many ways the leadership tried to crush any dissent over social reform. The character Dan in the film talks about the attempts by the rural poor to redistribute land and take over cattle. The leadership in real life was very hostile to this. We have to remember too that Arthur Griffiths, leader of Sinn Fein was a very socially conservative figure that’s why we put in the character Dan the train driver who quoted James Connolly and had been involved in the 1913 Lockout. That was a really incredible dispute when Dublin’s tram drivers went on strike. The trams were owned by William Murphy who also had a newspaper which in 1916 called for Connolly’s execution. So when he talks to Dan and the other young people saying that they are not just fighting to change the colour of the flag or the accent of the bosses this rings true to him.

The rightwing press didn’t like the film at all but they didn’t deal with the content. Mostly they compared Ken Loach to the woman who used to be called “Hitler’s film maker” Leni Riefenstahl and people like that. There was lots of personal abuse, mainly directed at Ken. Just after the film won the Palme d’Or there were about seven critical reviews all written by people who could not possibly have seen it. It was quite a remarkable series of diatribes against it. A thing that seemed to drive the rightwing mad was seeing ordinary people talking about politics. The Sun wrote that “this is a film people must not see.” But interestingly enough in its Irish edition it’s headline was something like “Damien and the boys tan the Brits at Cannes.”

We show in the film that the railway workers did refuse to transport the British army and that they were threatened with immediate execution. The dockers too went on strike but overall, especially in relation to the treaty that partitioned Ireland the labour movement lacked the leadership of someone like James Connolly. After the treaty seventy percent of the fighters opposed this treaty but the conservative middle class leadership filled the political gap and there was great lack of leadership within the union movement. Its leaders were very conservative. They didn’t want to encourage anything that would split the nationalist vote.

The film was very well received in Ireland. In Britain it was shown at our normal fifty or sixty screens. It’s had an amazing reaction in France and in Spain where it’s just opened it’s had a great response too. I’d loved to have taken it to the non-nationalist areas in Belfast though I know that in nationalist areas it caused a lot of tears, debate and stirred up a lot of memories.