Good points and bad, but mostly bad.
I liked Route Irish up until the montage of footage from Iraq and the scene in the pub that followed. At that point, what seemed like a fairly decent film turned into a Ken Loach lecture. It seemed like at that point Loach and Laverty needed to get in their anti-American jabs. Fergus's line about "if they didn't support al qaeda before then they did afterwards" is probably the most unoriginal line of film dialogue I'll hear all year. An almost identical line was in The Hurt Locker.
I liked the Iraqi musician asking Fergus whether he cared about the Iraqi victims - a nice touch, as so many films that deal with the war only seem to be concerned with the US/UK victims. I was less impressed with the scene of the musician playing his guitar and explaining that Iraq was the cradle of civilisation. Did we really need to be told this? Again, it sounded like something Laverty or Loach had heard John Rees or the 2nd Viscount Stansgate say at a Stop the War Coalition meeting and scribbled down as if they were receiving some great insight into history, rather than a fact that quite a few people know.
Fergus's line about there being a "million dead" is also quite worrying. I presume Loach and Laverty got this figure from people who have extrapolated the 2006 Lancet body count of 650,000 extra deaths since the invasion and made it up to a round figure of a million now. There are two issues with this. First that nobody was claiming a million people had been killed as a result of the invasion in 2007, when the film is set, and second, the Lancet figure has been widely discredited and only gets used now by opponents to the war who seem to glory in the number of deaths it has caused.
The waterboarding scene - though very well done - seemed unnecessary, again it felt like Loach and Laverty, brainstorming an idea about a war in the Middle East, said "we've got to have a waterboarding scene". Confusing the abuse of Iraqi prisoners with the torture suffered by "enemy combatants" in the war on terror is of no use to anyone.
The film went on too long - an ending after the waterboarding scene would've been good.
John Bishop was surprisingly good in a limited role, but as someone else has mentioned, the BBC series Occupation did this earlier, and better. So far the Iraq War has been better served by TV than by film. There's a PhD thesis in there for someone.