Irish Pride and Disgrace
in Recent Films:
Ken Loach and Paul Greengrass
In viewing historical conflicts, each side – whether political party or ethnic group – tends to legitimise its own experience and to silence or even demonise the other’s experience. And another great obstacle in the way of the truth is the fact that, in the course of the conflict, the common decencies of civilisation, the basic freedoms, the established social and human values - in short, human rights – have often fallen victim to considerations such as political expediency and ‘national interests’.
In Ken Loach’s Hidden Agenda (1990), an American human rights lawyer arrives in Belfast to investigate the maltreatment of imprisoned IRA members. Then the lawyer is murdered by agents of British Intelligence: he had become unwittingly aware of the wire-tapping of prominent British politicians involved in a conspiracy for regime-change at Westminster. To investigate the murder, a British deputy chief constable is despatched – but this particular inquiry is nobbled by a blackmailing Northern Ireland police superintendent, who at one point argues: “To maintain the system, the abuse of power is sometimes necessary”.
Paul Greengrass’s Bloody Sunday (2002) endeavours to impartially document the fatal shooting by British troops of thirteen civilian marchers in Derry on Sunday, 30th January 1972. It details the provocations spurring the marchers – high rate of unemployment among Catholics, unfair distribution of social welfare, security-force raids on homes at midnight, internment of Irish republicans without trial – as well as the mentality of British paratroopers on the day: they wanted to avenge the ‘forty-three’ colleagues who had been murdered by the IRA during previous incidents. Greengrass exposes the irrationality of both sides. (It is noteworthy that both he and Loach are British – and, because of their foregrounding of human rights, have been accused of betraying the British interest). He avoids sensationalist sloganeering in favour of an in-depth observation of the human tragedy in Derry – ultimately in the hope of bringing healing to the trauma of individual families and society on both sides of the Irish Sea.
Ken Loach’s The Wind That Shakes The Barley (2006) pits Irishman against (blood brother) Irishman during the Civil War. Apart from the portrayal of horrific tactics employed by the Black And Tans, here it is not English pride which is overriding human rights – but the pride of the Irish factional leaders who have claimed the opposing allegiances of the two brothers. The O’Donovans’ fratricidal conflict (and the antagonisms suffered by later generations) might have been avoided, if the instinct of common humanity had not become occluded by political supremacist ideology.
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