In recent years, western Europe has been so pacified by neoliberalism and the European Union that it’s sometimes hard to imagine how brutal “the troubles” and the deployment of the British Army to Northern Ireland (the first “war on terror”) really were. After all, aren’t the Irish just another dull, wealthy western European people like the French or the Dutch? They’re certainly not Serbs or Palestinians. But don’t take my word for it. The Troubles, an ethno-religious conflict between white, northern European Christians, is as recent as the childhood of most Millennials. Original documentary footage, real British soldiers on Patrol in Belfast, even made it onto MTV.
In 1990, Ken Loach, the leftist British filmmaker who had most the classic working class movie “Kes” in the 1960s, and who had spent most of the Thatcher years doing almost nothing at all, roared back to life in his mid-50s with Hidden Agenda, the first movie of the second act of his truly remarkable career. Loach is in fact not only still alive, but still so dangerous and relevant that he’s been “canceled” by respectable British public opinion for his support of Jeremy Corbyn and the Palestinians. In Hidden Agenda, he suggests that what happened in Northern Ireland in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, was more than an ethno-religious conflict between Protestant Anglo Saxons and Roman Catholic Celts. It was in fact the very destruction of British democracy.
Hidden Agenda opens at an “Orange Walk” in downtown Belfast in the late 1970s, an “Orange Walk” basically a gang of Protestants marching through the Catholic section of the city looking to pick fights. Paul Sullivan and Ingrid Jessner, two vaguely left wing American lawyers played by Brad Dourif and Frances McDormand, are giving a press conference. They have just concluded an investigation of human rights abuses committed by the British Army. Teresa Doyle, an Irish republican journalist, is not impressed. She has evidence of British soldiers committing extrajudicial executions. She confronts Jessner, accusing her of being used by the British government, and demands that Jessner meet her later to take possession of the photographs. While Jessner is chatting with Doyle, Sullivan walks outside to observe the parade, which he’s appalled by. “Tribalism” he whispers under his breath. Just then Captain Harris, a disgruntled British intelligence officer, slips a newspaper, which contains a cassette, into Sullivan’s hands.
If Doyle’s photographs of the British Army committing summary executions puts Jessner in grave danger, then Harris’s cassette, which contains evidence of a right wing faction in the British Conservative Party plotting not only to destabilize the Labor government but to discredit moderates inside the Tories, is a death sentence for Sullivan. Even though Sullivan and Jessner have experience in Chile during Pinochet’s coups, they have no idea how far out of their depth they really are. “What happened in Chile can’t happen here,” they reassure themselves. Teresa Doyle nor Captain Harris are not malicious or stupid. Both of them believe that since Sullivan and Jessner are prominent American human rights lawyers, the British security forces won’t touch either of them.
It is a grave mistake. Neither American nor white privilege means jack shit in Northern Ireland. It didn’t mean very much in Chile either, but both of them got lucky. Sullivan’s luck has run out. On the way to a meeting with Captain Harris to discuss the tape, a British Army death squad pulls up alongside of his car and machine guns him and his driver, a member of the IRA. The British soldiers then proceed to plant weapons in the car and switch Sullivan’s body to the passenger seat. They concoct a story that Sullivan’s driver tried to run a roadblock, where the guards had to return fire in self defense. The death squad it later turns out to have been a semi-independent anti-terrorist special operations unit empowered to fight the IRA by any means necessary. The authorities quickly accept their story at face value and declare the case closed.
Enter Peter Kerrigan, a senior police inspector from the mainland played by Brian Cox. Kerrigan is an honest, well-respected official, one of the very few men in the United Kingdom with the the authority to poke around the incestuous senior command in Belfast without ending up machine gunned himself. Even so he’s relentlessly stonewalled and misled by men who resent the idea of someone from “the mainland” undermining their authority, and barging into a war he just doesn’t understand. Nevertheless, Paul Sullivan’s murder was so heavy handed and incompetent it’s almost impossible to keep it under wraps for very long, and eventually the authorities in Belfast are ready to throw the members of the death squad that killed Paul Sullivan under the bus.
But Kerrigan, who has already made contact with Ingrid Jessner and Captain Harris is getting closer and closer to the tape and right wing coup that put Thatcher and her extremist right wing ideology into power. We begin to notice that the British state is far more sinister, and powerful, than we could have imagined. Not only is Ingrid Jessner under constant surveillance and Kerrigan constantly watched, even Captain Harris, an inexperienced British intelligence officer, can barely shake the surveillance for more than a few minutes. Just about the only place Kerrigan can meet freely with witnesses and interrogate Harris about the tape is under the protection of the IRA, which he despises. Nevertheless, Teresa Doyle sets Kerrigan and Jessner up to meet Captain Harris in an IRA pub, shortly after which the security forces kick in her door and drag Doyle off to prison.
That the British Army knew exactly what Kerrigan was doing and where he was to meet Captain Harris demonstrates clearly that the security forces have thoroughly infiltrated the IRA. By 1980s the Troubles were besides the point. How easily they were shut down in the 1990s as Ireland was brought into the neoliberal world order indicates that they were anything but a true ethno-religious conflict. Nobody in the heavily secular UK cares who’s Protestant and who’s Catholic anymore. But Northern Ireland in the 1970s, like Guantanamo Bay, the occupied territories in Israel, or Iraq, was a laboratory for the implementation of a totalitarian state in the heart of the “free” world. Kerrigan not only figures out exactly what was going on with the rise of Margaret Thatcher, he goes right to the powerful men who organized the coup and confronts them. They are rattled but still defiant. They had never expected this meddlesome policeman to get so far, but still know they can crush him like a bug.
Soon we begin to realize where their power comes from. Fascism isn’t conjured out of the ether by evil men. It’s made inevitable by the collaboration of good men. Inevitably Kerrigan realizes how far out of his depth he really is. The right wing coup plotters and the security forces have been watching him from the very beginning. They have photos of him meeting with known terrorists in an IRA pub. They have barely manipulated photos of him with Ingrid Jessner, who they inform Kerrigan has a long history of involvement with the Communist Party. They have already had their extensive contacts in the British media organize a complete smear campaign proving that he’s a terrorist sympathizer having an affair with an American communist. They make an offer. Prosecute the men who murdered Paul Sullivan and get out of the whole mess a hero who upheld the rule of law, or continue trying to investigate the coup, publish a story nobody’s going to believe anyway, and say goodbye to his marriage and his pension.
Kerrigan takes the offer.
Ingrid Jessner and Captain Harris make a valiant effort to expose the coup without Kerrigan but it’s hopeless. Another death squad grabs Harris in broad daylight right in the middle of Dublin, break both his legs, throw him in a van and put a bullet in his head. The IRA did it of course. Ingrid Jessner gets back to the United States with her life and the tape but without Harris or Kerrigan to cooperate her testify she’s only going to be dismissed as a loony conspiracy theorist and communist with two dead boyfriends in her past. Thatcher would eventually be gone, pushed out of office by poll tax riots. The United States would move in and negotiate an end to The Troubles. A few decades later, Ireland would be the richest country in Europe if measured by per capita income, and the Irish themselves be transformed into generic neoliberal western Europeans. But both Ireland and the UK would continue to live in the hell made by Thatcherism. Nothing can, or will ever change.