Routes Irish: ‘Irishness’, ‘authenticity’ and the working class in the films of Ken Loach

Abstract

Although the filmmaker Ken Loach possesses a reputation for dealing with Irish politics and history in his films and television plays, his portrait of the Irish in Britain has been much less commented upon. This article indicates how a discourse of ‘Irishness’ is threaded through his work set in England and Scotland and how this involves appealing to Irish-Catholic elements of working-class experience as a means of reinforcing the sense of ‘authenticity’ and working-class disadvantage that is the hallmark of his work. At the same time, it also involves invoking the working-class camaraderie and, in some cases, political resistance that is prompted by social and economic inequality. In this respect, Loach's films may be seen to rely on relatively familiar images of the Irish – variants of the ‘slum Irish’ and the ‘fighting Irish’ – while simultaneously complicating conventional understandings of the ‘British’ working class.

Keywords:

• Ken Loach
• Jim Allen
• Irish in Britain
• film and television drama

Notes

 1. Responding to a question about ‘new forms of politics … around feminism and … ethnicity’, Loach observed that ‘the heart of the struggle has got to be around the class that's got revolutionary potential’ and ‘the power to take the system by the throat and throttle it’ (Hill, ‘Interview with Ken Loach’, 166).

 2. Loach, ‘Director's Note’, 9.

 3. Lecture at ‘Radical and Popular Pasts: Public History Conference’, Ruskin College, Oxford, 17 March 2007. This phrase echoes that of Tony Garnett at the time of Days of Hope when he told the Radio Times: ‘our motive for going into the past is not to escape the present; we go into the past to draw lessons from it. History is contemporary’ (Lyndon, ‘Years of Promise’, 66).

 4. Speaking in 1990, the writer of Hidden Agenda (and Days of Hope), Jim Allen, referred to Northern Ireland as ‘the poisonous well of British politics’, going on to argue that ‘[w]hat happens here in Ireland on a Monday can happen there [Britain] on a Friday’ (Murphy and Gogan, ‘In the Name of the Law’, 16–17).

 5. Marx and Engels, Ireland and the National Question, 398.

 6. In his account of revolutionary groups in Britain, Peter Shipley indicates how Ireland was regarded as ‘Britain's Achilles heel that would have to be won over first before revolution on the mainland’ and cites the claims of the IMG (International Marxist Group) paper Red Mole (30 March 1972) that defeat of the British ruling class in Ireland ‘would immediately raise the revolutionary potential of the British working class’ (Revolutionaries in Modern Britain, 24, 119).

 7. John Belchem and Donald MacRaild indicate how ‘Irish and Catholic’ became ‘readily synonymous terms’ to describe the Liverpool-Irish (‘Cosmopolitan Liverpool’, 326), while Joseph Bradley suggests how the words ‘Catholic’ and ‘Irish’ became ‘essentially interchangeable in the West of Scotland’ (‘Celtic Football Club’, 98).

 8. Akenson, The Irish Diaspora, 214. This observation is made, however, in the context of Akenson's argument that Catholic emigration to Britain has been over-estimated and that Irish Protestants have accounted for around one quarter of immigrants to Britain.

 9. O'Connor, The Eleventh Commandment, 12–13.

10. Quart, ‘A Fidelity to the Real’, 29.

11. Williamson, Beynon, and Rowbotham, ‘Changing Images’, 100.

12. Reid, Class in Britain, 190. These figures are for the mid-1990s.

13. Writing in 1974, O'Connor suggests that ‘at least half’ the Catholics in Britain ‘may be reasonably held to be of immediate (first to third generation) Irish extraction’ (The Irish in Britain, 152).

14. Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, 122–4.

15. Belchem and MacRaild, ‘Cosmopolitan Liverpool’, 326.

16. Petley, ‘An Interview with Ken Loach’, 12. Loach has also claimed that the main challenge facing him as a director was ‘to put something in front of the camera that was absolutely authentic’ (Face to Face, tx. BBC2 19 September 1994).

17. Williams, ‘A Lecture on Realism’, 63.

18. There is, however, a degree of irony here in so far as the ‘authenticity’ of the Irish working class in Britain depends upon the association with the city and urban experience whereas, within Ireland, discourses of ‘authenticity’ have more commonly been linked to what Maurice Goldring refers to as ‘the myth of a rural civilisation’ (Faith of our Fathers, 57).

19. Hacker and Price, ‘Discussion with Ken Loach’, 293.

20. Allen, ‘The Way Back from the Legend’, 151. Loach's 2010 film Route Irish derives its title from the airport road in Baghdad linking the airport to the international zone. This nickname follows the common practice of naming supply routes after sports teams, in this case the ‘Fighting Irish’ of the University of Notre Dame (a traditional Irish-American Catholic university).

21. Murden, ‘“City of Change and Challenge”’, 432.

22. Martin McLoone indicates how the ‘enduring stereotype’ of ‘the priest in the community’ in Hollywood film has recently been challenged in Irish films (Film, Media and Popular Culture in Ireland, 114). His idea of ‘settling old scores’ could also be applied to many of the portraits of priests to be found in Loach’ work.

23. Commenting on the cardinal's intervention, Stuart Mews suggests how Catholic leaders were concerned to slow down ‘the radicalization of the Catholic working class’ that had occurred as a result of the British government's handling of the Irish question (‘The Churches’, 332–3).

24. The view of the Irish Civil War in The Wind that Shakes the Barley also shares a number of parallels with the portrait of the Spanish Civil War in Land and Freedom in which a village priest is actually shot for collaborating with Franco's fascists.

25. Black, ‘The Golden Vision’.

26. Hammond, ‘Estate of the Arts’, 22. Anthony Hayward also indicates that the Bishop of Salford refused to allow filming in the local church, partly, it is suggested, due to suspicion of the unorthodox activities of the priest in the film (Which Side Are You On?, 218).

27. This may be partly related to Jim Allen's own experience of growing up in an Irish-Catholic community in Manchester. As he explained: ‘[t]he severity of their [the Irish community's] struggle to exist has made them aware of the meaning of poverty … I would without hesitation, in time of stress and trouble, turn to them for help and comradeship’ (Various, Jim Allen, n.p.).

28. Although the imagery of the Irish immigrant is often associated with men (as in the work of Loach and Allen), the number of (young) Irish women emigrating to Britain has, historically, been almost as high as the men (O'Day, ‘Revising the Diaspora’, 189–90). Enda Delaney also indicates how ‘the third-wave emigration’ of the 1980s and 1990s, involving ‘skilled Irish, many of whom were graduates’, began to challenge traditional working-class stereotypes of the Irish in Britain (The Irish in Post-war Britain, 115).

29. Laverty, ‘Ae Fond Kiss (2004): Crew Notes’. A similar element of parallelism is suggested in Loach's contribution to Tickets, also written by Laverty, in which, as previously indicated, a group of young working-class Celtic supporters (a team with historic links to the Catholic-Irish working class in Glasgow) assist impoverished Albanians emigrating to Italy.