Northern Ireland's problems have been the subject of many movies, but how do the republicans and loyalists themselves rate their portrayal on film? Malachi O'Doherty reports.

'Even the Prods thought Odd Man Out was a good film," says David Ervine, now the leader of the Progressive Unionist party in Northern Ireland, but who was imprisoned in 1974 after being arrested driving a car bomb for the Ulster Volunteer Force.

Carol Reed's 1947 film, which stars James Mason as a wounded IRA man on the run through Belfast, is one of the greatest movies made about Northern Ireland, a film genre that owes itself to an anomaly: that Northern Ireland's story is not its own.

Northern Ireland is a small region with a population of 1.5 million, which has generated global interest because of the Troubles. But no film about the IRA can make a profit on ticket sales in Ireland alone. In theory, a producer could do very nicely with a film set in Belfast even if no one in Northern Ireland wanted to see it. That reduces the need for accuracy in the films that do get made. Most of the audience isn't going to quibble about detail.

Directors then usually go in one of two ways. They either present the IRA in the romanticised way it is viewed - however naively - by a large, distant audience, such as Irish America or the European left. Or they can use the IRA simply as a backdrop to a great morality drama in which the issue is more compelling than the detail.

But detail can make a crucial difference, even in a morality film. Some Mother's Son, made in 1996, starred Helen Mirren as a mother whose son goes on hunger strike, pulling her into an uncomfortable association with other families of IRA members. It actually touched on an interpretation of the hunger strike campaign that has been controversially restated only recently: the suggestion that the Republican leadership sought to prolong the strike because funerals were reaping more political gains than a resolution would have done.

That case was made last year by former IRA prison protester Richard O'Rawe in a memoir, Blanketmen. O'Rawe has been vilified by former comrades for claiming the prisoners on hunger strike had been ready to accept a deal after four men had died, but the IRA leadership outside the prison had over-ruled them. What did O'Rawe make of Some Mother's Son? "It was by and large well recreated."

There is a scene in which the young prisoner, kissing his mother, uses his tongue to shove a "comm", a message to be smuggled outside, into her mouth. This is the final indignity for the mother, being French-kissed by her son for the cause.

"That would have been a fairly regular thing," says O'Rawe. "I remember doing that with a woman in her 60s. The important thing was getting the comm out. I'd say she didn't mind though."

Anthony McIntyre, like O'Rawe, was a close friend of Bobby Sands. He recalls the scene in Some Mother's Son in which Sands, to lift the spirits of the men, shouts out orders to them to do press-ups. "I'd say the men would have been thinking 'Right, Bobby', and would have pretended they were doing the press-ups to humour him. And Bobby would have known that. But the film was good on the dirty double-dealing of the Brits."

When details are wrong, though, they stick out. In Neil Jordan's The Crying Game, Stephen Rea at one point says: "Have you ever tried picking up your teeth with broken fingers?" Unrealistic, says O'Rawe. "No Belfast man would come out with a line like that without having to spend the whole night thinking it up."

That's not all. "That kneecapping scene from In the Name of the Father? Rubbish!"

McIntyre doubts it is possible for any director or actor to recreate the IRA as it actually was, though Brad Pitt visited him for guidance on how to play his role in The Devil's Own, with his voice coach, Brendan Gunn. Nevertheless, the film-makers had their own idea of what Pitt's character should be - a devout Catholic prone to saying such things as: "Poor Annie, killed by a plastic bullet, may God have mercy on her soul." Which is the sort of thing an IRA man's grandmother might have said.

The Devil's Own is the Hollywood counterbalance to films such as Ken Loach's Hidden Agenda and The Wind That Shakes the Barley. While they take a sympathetic view of the republican movement from the perspective of the European left, The Devil's Own was aimed squarely at the romantics in the Irish-American audience. And because its audience was so distant from the reality of Northern Ireland, the film was able to depict the IRA as almost a military match for the British army, which was never even a remote prospect.

Even if McIntyre believes the IRA is unfilmable, he has a favourite IRA movie: Shake Hands With the Devil, starring James Cagney and made in 1959. "It was a big event when we were kids and we were all waiting for it to come on TV, and there was a rumour that it would be banned. I was furious at the end because Cagney got shot by the guy who wanted to accept the truce."

The other anomaly of Northern Ireland cinema is that it usually tells stories in which the characters are Republican or British. If directors have been attracted to the IRA for stories, few have even noticed that they were opposed by loyalist paramilitary armies, recruited in Protestant communities.

The one film about loyalists that David Ervine praises is one made for television (which is better at capturing nuance because it has to convince the local viewers). As the Beast Sleeps, written by Gary Mitchell, captured a moment, Ervine says, "but I'm not sure anyone has tried to get a broad understanding of loyalism".

He claims that loyalist history has the makings of a heroic story.

"It is the history of an explosion of violence, a society that wasn't being protected, and people saying, to hell with that. People were inspired to become involved because they didn't know what else to do."

Another former loyalist, Davy Adams, who was an officer in the Ulster Defence Association, says he has no interest in these Troubles films, not because they usually glorify the IRA but because he simply doesn't want to rake over the past. "But I liked The Boxer," he says.

Perhaps the appeal of The Boxer (1997) lies in its depicting a story similar to his own, a former paramilitary trying to break his ties with the past but under pressure from those around him. When Adams broke from the UDA, his home was attacked.

A story has to resonate with experience to appear true, and many of the films about the IRA do not resonate in that way with men who were in the IRA. The best speak to the experience of all of us and could as well have been made against another backdrop. The worst resonate only with the romantic nostalgia of ill-informed Irish-American chauvinists.

But even when a film has people from both sides of the community applauding, there'll be something to find fault with. Odd Man Out was a good film, a Presbyterian minister from Derry tells me, "but the accents were dreadful. Cyril Cusack was the only one to make an effort to get the Northern accent right."

Odd Man Out is reissued at the IFI from Friday