This opening chapter situates O’Casey in the Dublin of his time, describing the existence of O’Casey’s Protestant family in Dublin’s Northside. The chapter contrasts that lower-middle-class existence with the disease and insecurity of the slum areas of Dublin. We encounter the political and cultural sensibilities of the Irish capital’s Catholic working-class population, a population that profoundly affected O’Casey’s life and work. The chapter shows O’Casey to be a writer who moved between and across social and cultural groupings in Dublin, with this part of the volume highlighting the Irish capital’s differing religious and political affiliations in the early twentieth century.

This chapter sets O’Casey’s political activism within its contemporary contexts. The chapter focuses on the years before the Easter Rising, which were formative for O’Casey’s political development, and shows how the would-be writer developed a political and cultural appreciation through membership of organisations such as the Gaelic League. Readers will discover how O’Casey’s activism in the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) and in the Irish Citizen Army (ICA) shaped the perspective that informed his iconoclastic views on the revolutionary events of 1916-23.

Chapter two examines the conflicting nationalist politics mobilising Irish volunteers in wartime Britain. It profiles the political languages and cultures of Irish volunteers in British centres, from the 150,000 recruits in the British armed forces to the eighty-seven rebels in the armed forces of the Irish Republic; interrogates the correspondence, and separation, of Irish nationalist identities between home/front; and charts the rise, and estranged demise, of Irish Party support in wartime Britain. The Irish Party, this chapter submits, successfully maintained its ‘two face’ political position in Britain, in anticipation of a short war and a bitterly contested general election on the Home Rule issue, a political strategy termed ‘home front nationalism’. Redmond’s rejection of a British Cabinet position in May 1915, and the I.P.P.’s rejection of conscription in January 1916, however, fatally undermined the Irish Party’s policy. The participation of British-based Irish Volunteers in the 1916 Rising was a rebellion against the wartime politics of ‘home front nationalism’ and British citizenship. An examination of the ‘British connection’ to the Rising, from the Edinburgh-born James Connolly to the London-based Michael Collins, supports the thesis that military strategy was not the primary focus of the 1916 leaders.