Irish actor Liam Cunningham said about the film and its director Ken Loach "It took an Englishman to come over for me to force me in the position to examine my own history."
A three legged dog can be seen walking across the screen. This is something of a trademark of Ken Loach's films. Initially it was an accident with a dog wandering into the shot, but it became a planned feature of his films later.
All the British soldiers are played by ex-British army soldiers. They were told not to overplay it, but act as they would if searching or interrogating insurgents.
The commercial interest expressed in the United Kingdom was initially much lower than in other European countries and only 30 prints of the film were planned for distribution in the UK, compared with 300 in France. However, after the Palme d'Or award the film appeared on 105 screens in the UK, more than three times larger than the UK release for any of Ken Loach's previous films.
The title was taken from "The Wind that Shakes the Barley" by 19th century poet Robert Dwyer Joyce, about a young man who joins the 1798 rebellion after his true love is killed. "But blood for blood without remorse/ I've taken at Oulart Hollow/ And laid my true love's clay-cold corpse / Where I full soon may follow /As 'round her grave I wander drear /Noon, night and morning early / With breaking heart when e'er I hear /The wind that shakes the barley."