The trouble with the English, Salman Rushdie once observed, is that so much of their history has happened overseas that they have no idea what it all really means. (And this was said before the days of penalty shoot-outs,) writes Declan Kiberd.
Ken Loach agrees with Rushdie. Interviewed in Total Film after the triumph of The Wind That Shakes the Barley at the Cannes Film Festival, he said that he made it in order to teach his own people about their imperial past.
It's easy to see why the French warmed to Loach's artistic indictment of British brutality in the Cork area during the War of Independence.
The ferocity of the Black-and-Tans is attributed in the film not just to anti-Irish bigotry but, even more tellingly, to the traumatising effect on young men of the carnage in the trenches of the first World War.
Acts of equal barbarity inflicted by the Irish upon one another during the ensuing Civil War are treated in much less graphic detail.
Loach is a socialist. He gives us "history from below", as experienced by ordinary people, whose private lives are invaded and even obliterated by great public events.
At many moments, the actors seem to stumble over their sentences, as real people do in pressured situations of everyday life.
The film is austere, moving and honest, though - like much socialist art - less interested in the nuances of individual personality than the viewer might wish. And Loach is but the latest in a long and honourable line of English radicals who have used the Irish question as a parabolic way of asking who is to inherit England.
That list included not just contemporary politicians like Tony Benn and Ken Livingstone, who pointed to the ways in which the denial of civil liberties in Northern Ireland was having a corrupting effect on British politics in general, it also embraces such historical movements as the Levellers and the Fabians, or such writers as William Blake and Percy Bysshe Shelley.
There is a beautiful, understated scene early in Loach's film when an engine-driver, thrown into jail alongside an apprentice doctor on the Irish nationalist side, quotes William Blake: "And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds/And binding with briars my joys and desires". The young doctor, already a socialist, knows the line and nods.
Blake was, of course, an English republican - and so is Ken Loach. During Loach's version of the Treaty debates, a voice shouts "You can't be free under a king!" This film is a contribution to a developing undertone in an England, whose people have been exhausted and disabled by the burden of wearing the "butcher's apron". The English sports fans at Wimbledon this past week have been far more likely to fly the Cross of St George than the Union Jack - and for reasons which are intimately connected with the arguments made and implied in Loach's film.
For over two centuries, English identity has been drained away and subsumed under the sign of Britishness. The cut-away coat in the Romantic period, roast beef in the Victorian, common-sense empirical philosophy in the 20th century - all these English traditions have, in effect, been taken away from their English authors and rebranded as British. One result is that the English are no longer sure of their identity and feel quite underdressed in the fashion parade of nations.
Back in 1998, a then radical Tony Blair resolved to do something about all this. He took a step back towards a distinct English identity, when he provided in the Belfast Agreement not just for home-rule parliaments in Edinburgh, Belfast and Cardiff, but also for the possibility of one in London itself.
In the same year, the writer AS Byatt produced in her brilliant introduction to The Oxford Book of English Short Stories an attempt to define a canon of English, not British, prose.
That old Fabian, George Bernard Shaw, would have been delighted by these demonstrations that the idea of a resurgent English nationalism belongs more to liberals and socialists than to the Powellite right wing.
"Whenever Londoners ask me the meaning of those dreaded words Sinn Féin," he joked in 1920, "I tell them it is the Irish for John Bull". And his fellow-socialist, Oscar Wilde, had argued, with only part of his tongue in his cheek, that England itself might be the ultimate British colony, in need of rescuing by radicals who could return it to its best traditions.
Loach is but the latest rescuer. Far from hating his country, as Ruth Dudley Edwards alleged in the Daily Mail, he loves and celebrates the land of Milton, Blake and Shelley. And, in liberating a hidden but never completely lost idea of England, he is helping to remind us on this island of the story of how Ireland freed itself.
People who ask hard questions within their own communities should always be encouraged. For years, some who explored the blind-spots of Irish nationalism were given an annual prize in memory of the murdered British ambassador, Christopher Ewart-Biggs. Maybe it's time now to establish an award which recognises the contribution of many English people to a fuller understanding of Ireland.
Ken Loach would be a worthy recipient.