What makes Juno and the Paycock a masterpiece is that even today it teaches us important lessons about Irish society that should have been learnt nearly a century ago. This tragi-comedy is the second play of Sean O'Casey's Dublin trilogy and was first performed in 1924. It's a grim tale of the Boyle family who live in a tenement in Dublin during the Irish Civil War that began in 1922.

At the centre of the play is Juno, a women who has struggled in life but has a great strength and realism. The men of the play are presented as moral weaklings, especially the workshy Captain Jack Boyle referred to as the “Paycock because of his tendency to strut uselessly about, and his friend Joxer was he spends most of his time with in the pub. The play skilfully deals with themes of poverty, religion and war by forcing us to look at everything from a domestic point of view. It shows the true cost of war and in particular how the Irish Civil War affected the working class of Ireland, through the character of Johnny how has been Left wounded in the Easter Rising of 1916.

The author was an interesting character himself. The play expresses O'Casey's frustration and anger at the marginalisation of the working class by middle class conservatives in Ireland's revolution. O'Casey was born into a poor Protestant family in Dublin's north inner city. He was a Gaelic speaker in the Irish Republican Brotherhood and the Irish Citizen Army and an active trade unionist.

He was highly sceptical of the middle class militants who rose to positions of prominence in the run up to 1916. Of revolutionary socialist James Connolly, a leading figure in the Easter Rising, he says, "He saw red no longer, but stared into the sky for a green dawn."

The eclipse of the organised working class and the betrayal of that part of the struggle led O'Casey to write this play and through it he expressed his anger at the mess that was created by partition.