Word: irelands
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...title does not exactly sing seductively: The Wind that Shakes the Barley. What are we talking about here - agronomy? Nor does its narrative - 1920s Ireland in the throes of what we would now call an "insurgency" - provide the analogies to current events that it would have been easy to make. Then there's the Ken Loach problem. He is a mild-mannered English leftist who has been for years making earnest, naturalistic, rather conventionally mounted studies about working-class topics that do not make the cinephile's aesthete spirit leap in anticipation. He's the kind of guy who turns...
...with the Irish Republican Army: a small, beleaguered guerrilla group, fighting in the years immediately after World War I for independence from British rule, which was then being enforced by the Black and Tans, vicious and largely undisciplined soldiers recruited from the demobilized English army and functioning in Ireland as terrorist-enforcers of the status quo. Loach's film, written by Paul Laverty, focuses on a Sinn Fein (or revolutionist) "flying column" operating in County Cork, with special emphasis on a gentle young doctor, Damien (Cillian Murphy) and his more hot-headed brother, Teddy (Padraic Delaney), who is the group...
...troubles" that began in Ireland almost a hundred years ago, did not end with the response to the Free State election, even though the revolutionary answer to it was rather quickly put down. They have persisted into our own times and Loach's film is permeated with an unspoken acknowledgment of that fact. Nor can we ignore that other insurgencies, engendered largely by the stupidity and arrogance of imperialist powers, are everywhere present in our own world - though, again, Loach allows our thoughts to drift in that direction without guidance from him. Loach may not be a sockeroo filmmaker...
...Ireland's Revival E.U. structural funds aren't the only reason that the Emerald Tiger roars, and Ireland isn't the only place where money from Brussels has helped build a modern infrastructure. But there's something about the scale of the transformation of Ireland's economy since membership in 1973 that boggles the mind...
...Clearing this sort of hurdle has become an art form in Northern Ireland, but the efforts are complicated by a deadline. The British Government has given the parties until March 26th to strike a deal. If it doesn't happen, they say they will pull the plug on the newly elected Northern Ireland Assembly and start looking at other arrangements for governing the region. Paisley thinks they're bluffing, in part because the deadline is being dictated by Tony Blair's desire to see a decade of effort on Northern Ireland rewarded with a settlement before his impending retirement. British...