The Wind that Shakes the Barley (2006).

The top grossing Irish film in the 2006 box office was also its most controversial. Ken Loach's The Wind that Shakes the Barley won the 'Palme d'Or' at Cannes in May '06, was released in Ireland in June '06 and had become the highest grossing domestically produced film ever by August '06. (1) Set during the War of Independence and the Civil War, the film starred Cillian Murphy alongside a mix of professional and non-professional actors, and followed the fates of two Cork-born brothers who, in the best tradition of the Civil War narrative, ultimately ended up on opposing political sides of the conflict.

What I would like to explore here is not so much the content of the film, which is very much in the mould of Loach's oeuvre, but the responses to it from a variety of interest groups who made the most of the media's fallow summer period to express their disparate and often conflicting opinions on a film that was widely perceived as a 'corrective' to Neil Jordan's earlier Michael Collins (1996). Here was the Fianna Fail film that would set the record straight on Jordan's …