While O’Casey’s upbringing was not quite as impoverished as he implied in his autobiographies, his proximity to extreme povery from a young age likely had an effect on his politics as a young man and adult. Though his class status and Protestant religion allowed him access to white-collar work, O’Casey “repeatedly found himself at odds with his supervisors and unable to hold down a job” (Moran 12). He worked for the Great Northern Railway from 1903 until, reacting to Labour discontent and identifying him as a “potential rabble-rouser,” they sacked him in 1911 (12, 14). This lead O’Casey to his “abiding attraction to left-wing politics” and a friendsip with important Irish Labour leader Jim Larkin (14). Assisting with Labour movements and strikes following this, O’Casey was also involved in the nationalist movement for Irish independence. However, when it seemed to him the nationalist leaders had lost their focus on the plight of the workers, notably in nationalist leader Patrick Pearse’s choice to continue riding the trams during the tram worker strike in 1913, O’Casey chose not to fight in the Easter RIsing (15). The three plays in his Dublin Trilogy, The Shadow of a Gunman, Juno and the Paycock, and The Plough and the Stars all deal heavily with issues of the Irish independence movement, set during a series of conflicts involving rebels O’Casey knew personally. The three plays seem to portray his complicated feelings about the movement and his choice not to fight, with Moran noting “an undoubted element of survivor guilt” in the plays along with often biting critique of the rebels (16).
O’Casey’s belief in the socialist cause grew as his life carried on, writing The Star Turns Red in 1938 in support of the ways of Stalin and the USSR, which he had never witnessed for himself but believed were “the best hope for humanity” (27). During World War II, he continued “championing the USSR,” and wrote a “highly autobiographical” play called Red Roses for Me which concerns “a Dublin militant who dies on behalf of the workers during a dispute with a railway company,” clearly echoing his own experience as a young man working for the railroad and getting fired for fear of organized action (29). His care for the plight of workers clearly carried through his life.
Despite his lifelong care for the oppressed poor, O’Casey was unfortunately unsympathetic to the situation of another oppressed group, homosexuals. His letters reveal him repeatedly complaining that many of the men involved in theater are homosexual and that this might somehow be hurting the quality of his work, even saying in 1945, “I shouldn’t call dislike of ‘conceited amateurs, arrogant homosexuals, and impertinent dilletantes’ a prejudice. I hate them” (24). As Moran notes, this sort of blatant homophobia was extremely common in the time, but it is disappointing that a man so “genuinely outraged by political and social injustices across the globe” couldn’t see anything similar in the plight of homosexuals to see them as more people in need of an ally, not enemies of him and his art (24-25).