In chapter four, Sean Williams illustrates the creative potential of music and dance for the development of revivalism up to the present day. During the early years of the Revival, beginning in the 1890s, Irish dance and music were governed by strict ideas about form and performance promulgated by such groups as the Gaelic League. Music and dance, in different ways, underscore the difficulties of remaining connected to traditional standards while allowing the introduction of modern or non-Irish elements in singing style, dance steps, and instrumentation. At each stage of the development of cultural revivalism, cultural authenticity is vitally important. Despite apparent ruptures in the traditions of music and dance, both have flourished on a world stage with their “Irishness” intact. Because of the inclusion of non-Irish dance and vocal styles, a contemporary spectacle such as Riverdance, while quite different from traditional forms of dance, remain connected to broader revivalist concerns.

This chapter argues that O’Casey’s plays of the 1940s and 1950s articulate an ethical vision affronted at the endurance of injustice in an otherwise changing world. In particular, this chapter reads Cock-a-Doodle Dandy (1949) as a metatheatrical script for performance, in which important public questions are revisited and dramatic models refashioned. This play, and other so-called experimental works, testifies to O’Casey’s relentless quest for form adequate to the predicament of the citizens of Independent Ireland, almost forty years after the departure of British forces.

O’Casey was a great writer of war, and he wrote a great deal during the Second World War when he lived in England, although much of this work has failed to find a place in the theatrical repertoire. This chapter focuses on the two wartime plays set during the war: the comic Purple Dust (1940), about two Englishmen moving to Ireland to escape the conflict; and the tragic Oak Leaves and Lavender (1946), set during the Battle of Britain. This chapter shows how the geopolitics of the Second World War, combined with O’Casey’s complex political affiliations and a heightened anxiety about Irish masculinity, placed O’Casey in a position from which he found it difficult to speak.

The creation of the Irish Free State, with its largely Catholic ethos, destroyed the Protestant nationalist hope for an all-Ireland, secular republic. The Conclusion opens with a discussion of how a number of prominent Protestant nationalists adapted to life in the Free State. It discusses figures, such as Douglas Hyde, Ernest Blythe, and David Lubbock Robinson, who found success in the new state, and those such as George Russell and George Irvine, who came to react against it. It ends by stressing the extent to which Protestant nationalists formed identifiable denomination-based networks, and spent vast amounts of time seeking to inculcate nationalist sentiment in their fellow Protestants. It argues for the importance of associational culture as a category of historical research. Finally, it stresses both the diversity of Irish Protestant society during the period 1900–1923, and highlights the sense of loss engendered among some Catholic nationalists with the decline of a substantial Protestant nationalist activist tradition.