There can be no comparison between the behaviour of the Black and Tans and that of the rebels during the Irish War For Independence (that's what it was folks!). On the one hand you had a badly armed, poorly trained group of fighters carrying out a guerrilla campaign in order, as they saw it, to free their country; on the other there were the armed representatives of the most powerful nation on earth acting under the orders of their government to subdue the Irish people by whatever means necessary. One of the British military leaders at the time, later to become Montgomery of Alamein, complained that the troops were not "pursuing their orders with enough enthusiasm".
In such circumstances it would be more than a little naïve to expect the opposing sides to shake hands after a hard days fighting and say, "Good, clean fight chaps, same time tomorrow".
Any judgment of the war must be based on whether you believe the Irish were entitled to fight for their independence, nothing more or less.
If there was anything missing from Loach's film, it was the fact that the brutality depicted was taking place all over Ireland and it was officially sanctioned and not just the work of a handful of British thugs.
About ten years ago the BBC put on a play called 'All Around The Empire Room' which was a fictionalised account of a series of meetings between Lloyd George and Michael Collins in order to agree the terms of the treaty. It opened with the narrator saying something like, "In 1922 a treaty for the independence of Ireland was signed. Between that time and this, every bomb exploded, every bullet fired, every man woman and child killed or maimed in the name of Irish freedom, can be traced directly back to a series of meetings that took place at number ten Downing Street at that time".
Jim Carroll