O’Casey was born into a Dublin and an Ireland divided over many issues, but most pertinently the question of Protestant or Catholic, and remaining part of England or separating from it for Home Rule. O’Casey was born a Protestant in a Dublin where 80 percent of the population of 250,000 were Catholic, most of them poor, while “most of the Protestant minority were well off or members of the gentry and titled Anglo-Irish” (Krause 9). While his family was less well-off than many other Protestants of the time, despite what he wrote in his his autobiographies his family was likely pro-union as Protestants aligned with a London-based evangelical group (Murray 22). However, by the time he was 26 O’Casey had joined the Irish Republican Brotherhood, a group in support of Home Rule (23).
Around O’Casey’s birth in 1880 the movement for Home Rule had already begun in earnest, with an election the same year proving the populace’s interest in the movement (21). While the progress was slow and met with many political challenges and failed attempts at Home Rule bills, the Gaelic League, a cultural nationalist group focused on furthering the speaking of Irish of which O’Casey was a member, and the Irish Republican Brotherhood both assisted in furthering the concept of Home Rule in the hearts of the Irish (“Ireland”, Moran 12). Both sides of the conflict within Ireland formed their own armed forces to fight for Irish independence or for the Union, but the start of World War I stopped what was beginning to look like civil war breaking out. However, as the war dragged on the Irish Republican Brotherhood planned a “revolutionary outbreak,” and on Easter Monday 1916, about 1,000 men and women were engaged in a battle leading to a provisionary Irish government being proclaimed until British forces overpowered the dissidents and forced the leaders to surrender. This was not the end of the movement, however, and lead both to increasing political success for those fighting for independence and to the formation of the Irish Republican Army, which fought a geurilla war against British forces which ended in 1921, leading into a treaty which established Ireland as a free state with ties to England but let the largely unionist Northern Ireland opt out of this and remain part of Britain. However, many nationalists felt the treaty did not go far enough for Irish freedom leading to “a bitter civil war that cost almost 1,000 lives” (“Ireland”). The plays in O’Casey’s Dublin Trilogy are all set in the context of these conflicts over Irish independence, reflecting his complicated personal experiences around them. Conflict between pro- and anti-treaty views replaced unionist and nationalist conflict after the civil war, but over the following decades Irish leadership by figures such as former nationalist fighter De Valera worked to reduce and remove Ireland’s legal connections to England, leading to (non-northern) Ireland becoming a fully independent Republic in 1949 (“Ireland”).