Paul Laverty, Ken Loach’s screenwriter, explains the genesis of their film

In and between all the other projects we have worked on together, Ken has for years suggested we should try to make a film in Ireland. This was a prospect that immediately excited me because I was fascinated by Irish history and because it touched very deep childhood memories.

We discussed many different possibilities, but we thought that the critical period of the war of independence (which followed the December 1918 election that is, of course, never mentioned in Irish discussions in the UK) and subsequent civil war allowed us to touch on many questions and contradictions. It was very important for us to try to imagine not only what these men and women were fighting against, but what they were fighting for. Another key decision was to have fictional characters rather than real historical characters, fascinating though that choice would have been.

Having recently tried to write a biopic on another film, it was a relief to explore a range of voices that, we hope, are true to the times without being bogged down by the biographic and geographic detail. And of course setting the story around a Flying Column gave us an opportunity of dealing with the above, but also the chance of trying to imagine how the choices of the time unravelled and affected, intimately, the young men and women at a critical point in their lives.

In trying to imagine the blend of voices in the Flying Column I was greatly helped by the extensive and contested literature, photographs and memories of younger relatives. Also vital was something very personal: childhood memories of my uncle Pat Downey's farm in County Limerick. As a teenager, too, I remember tales of the Black and Tans from my cousins' grandfather Gerald Kelly, who trenched roads and chopped down trees for the IRA. Pat's father, my grandfather, Michael Downey, hid IRA guns in their barn during the war of independence. Pat died when I was writing this script. There was something spirited about him which helped me imagine the young farmers and farmworkers who volunteered to join the Flying Columns.

No more lies

While we were preparing this film, Chancellor Gordon Brown made a speech in which he said: "We should celebrate much of our past rather than apologise for it. And we should talk, and rightly so, about British values that are enduring, because they stand for some of the greatest ideas in history - tolerance, liberty, civic duty - that grew in Britain and influenced the rest of the world. Our strong traditions of fair play, of openness, of internationalism, these are great British values."

It is one thing to forget, quite another to invent selectively. Brown is not alone among the British establishment in trying to romanticise colonial days. This story takes place in one small corner of the then British empire, on which, as so many children were proudly told, "the sun never sets". Perhaps it is much easier to lie about the present and future if we lie about the past.

This piece appears in "The Wind That Shakes the Barley: a screenplay", published by Galley Head Press (£11.95)

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