The Story of the Irish Citizen Army

by Seán O'Casey

This is the first account of the formation of the Irish Citizen Army during the Dublin strike of 1913-1914, and the part it played in the subsequent history of Ireland. The author, who was himself a leading figure in the movement, writes with vigor and conviction on the role of labor in Ireland, and expresses a very definite opinion on the relations of the workers to the Nationalist movement. The book contains character portraits of Larkin, Connolly and the Countess Markiewicz; and facts bearing on the relations between the Citizen Army and the Volunteers emerge here for the first time.This dramatic account of the Irish Citizen Army also has its special importance in literary history as the first published work by Sean O'Casey (under the pseudonym of P. O. Cathasaigh). Sean O'Casey went on to become Ireland's greatest playwright as well as the author of one of the most fascinating autobiographies in the history of literature.

Genres: History

84 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1919

About the author

Sean O'Casey was born in 1880 and lived through a bitterly hard boyhood in a Dublin tenement house. He never went to school but received most of his education in the streets of Dublin, and taught himself to read at the age of fourteen. He was successively a newspaper-seller, docker, stone-breaker, railway-worker and builders' labourer. In 1913 he helped to organise the Irish Citizen Army which fought in the streets of Dublin, and at the same time he was learning his dramatic technique by reading Shakespeare and watching the plays of Dion Boucicault. His early works were performed at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, and Lady Gregory made him welcome at Coole, but disagreement followed and after visiting America in the late thirties O'Casey settled in Devonshire. He lived there until his death in 1964, though still drawing the themes of many of his plays from the life he knew so well on the banks of the Liffey. Out of the ceaseless dramatic experimenting in his plays O'Casey created a flamboyance and versatility that sustain the impression of bigness of mind that is inseparable from his tragi-comic vision of life.

He was a major Irish dramatist and memoirist. A committed socialist, he was the first Irish playwright of note to write about the Dublin working classes.

Reviews

[R. Reddebrek · Rating 3 out of 5]

This short account of the Irish Citizen Army ICA contains a lot of very important information that help establish why in particular the civil war would break out. And O'Casey does a lot with a few pages to make the ICA feel like an organisation made of real working men, with personalities.

Unfortunately its writing style makes for very difficult reading, at least at the start. Its incredibly purple in prose, which is an odd choice since this is a factual record of events and not a romance novel. Thankfully it largely leaves the constant abstractions and references to antiquity after the first chapters.