Letters I've Written and Letters I Haven't Written to the London Review of Books on the National Question

I’ve written I think three letters to the London Review of Books, all of them to do with their Irish coverage. They published the first one.

The second went after an English academic who published an extended hatchet job on one of the greatest minds this country’s ever produced shortly after he died. I sat down to it one evening in that cozy frame of mind when you know - or think you know - you’re about to read an essay by someone who intends to do justice to a subject you’re interested in, but it made me so furious I couldn’t sleep that night. One of the arguments it made was that surveying the literature coming out of Irish cultural studies you wouldn’t be faulted for thinking heteronormativity did more damage to the Irish psyche than the Black and Tans. Having spent a few years in that milieu I’d be inclined to agree, but this lad was essentially using post-Marxism as a gunrest to shoot anti-imperialism: we’re all environmentalists / Foucauldians / pick-your-identityists now, therefore Irishness and wherever you go from there, is retrograde, a bit suss. The letter I wrote made the point that the author was working too hard to separate imperialism out from other horizons of social justice, such as climate. I dusted off the old Conor McCabe Lars Mjøset ranchers argument, some stuff about deforestation and the British navy, Roger Casement’s wedding of language preservation and the proto-environmentalism he derived from his experiences in Brazil.

So it was too ambitious for a letter, you have to keep these things short. In retrospect I should have latched onto one particular line this guy had which asserted that Irish nationalists refuse to take Protestants on their own terms, and demand instead that they turn into Wolfe Tone. This is always the point in the argument where imperialists play their hand, revealing that their idea that the factory settings for Irish Protestants is: monarchist. Given that Wolfe Tone, along with his comrades in the United Irishmen, applied to an Irish context the principles of the French Revolution and the ideals of the Enlightenment from which all forms of politics which move towards liberation ultimately derive their foundational principles, I would say the least of what I’d ask of any political subject is that they turn themselves into Wolfe Tone.

I can’t remember the third, I think it was about the Provos.

I’m thinking of submitting a fourth since the latest issue has an article about Ken Loach which runs large parts of his ouevre down for its propagandistic or simplistic impulses. The Wind That Shakes the Barley (2006) and Land and Freedom (1995) are cited directly as repetitive fables of martyrdom. I never liked the latter much, the representation of the monopoly that Soviets secured over the war effort in Spain at the expense of the militia system is figured as evil Stalinist betrayal, which is I think only one facet of the tragedy there. In addition the love story doesn’t come off, but The Wind That Shakes the Barley is one of my favourite films.

In litigating the film many Irish critics take issue with the idea that class was really that prominent within the Treaty / anti-Treaty debates and while Mellows and O’Donnell were indeed a minority of a minority on a side within which mass mobilisation was not in the organisational vocabulary, 1916 - 1922 had a class character on which Loach (thanks in part to his historical advisor Donal Ó Drisceoil) is clearer than almost every Irish historian and commentator I have on my bookshelves. The fact of it is that I’m probably never going to allow a bad word spoken about a film in which there is a scene (which did not make the final cut) in which one IRA member criticises the sectarianism of another by invoking 1798 but none of these arguments, rooted in historical accuracy, succeed in addressing the actual criticism, so I’ll try another tack.

I contend that in that final shot where Sinéad is left by herself outside the homestead, as the man who has to have had his hair made up to look like Collins on purpose pulls off, is the one of the most concentrated symbols of the closed possibilities for the future of social life in the half-Republic, especially given the prominence the film grants to Cumann na mBan and the Dáil Courts. These scenes, the meticulous reconstruction of setpieces from Tom Barry’s memoirs, are far more figurative than the ortho-Trotskyist betrayal of the leaders which do, to some extent, let down a couple of Loach’s other works. The fact that the plot of the twentieth century is a constrained drama, the a to b of: assertion of agency from below → heroic martyrdom, has to count for something here.

So what I do celebrate about this film is its qualities as an intervention. As a successful work of art that cleaves very closely to actuality and maintains an otherwise extinct tradition of anti-imperialist cinema and I’d be thinking here of The Battle of Algiers (1966), Report to Mother (1986), Z. (1969).

While I find his later works on the nightmare of contemporary England too much to bear, I’ll miss him when he’s gone.