A century ago, playwright Seán O’Casey pinned a note over his desk in the dimly lit room he rented on the North Circular Road: “Get on with the Bloody play.” That play became the Plough and the Stars, which he completed in 1925 and sent to the Abbey Theatre, where it was first staged in February 1926. It caused heated controversy due to its depiction of the gulf between revolutionary rhetoric and action in 1916 and the reality of tenement life and death. It eschewed glorification of the rebels, and its language, according to one of the Abbey players writing to Abbey co-founder Lady Augusta Gregory, was “beyond the beyonds ... at anytime I would think twice before having anything to do with it”.
O’Casey came late to writing, with his first play staged when he was 43, but he made up for lost time, producing his trilogy of Dublin plays in 1923-1926. The controversies they aroused were sometimes visceral. He found a generous sponsor initially in Lady Augusta Gregory, whom he considered “an extraordinarily broad-minded woman”. She and fellow Abbey creator WB Yeats held firm during the protests in 1926, and the Plough and the Stars played to a packed theatre.
O’Casey’s biographers have illuminated his struggle to gain artistic recognition and that included money worries and rejected manuscripts. He was still working as a labourer when the Shadow of a Gunman was staged in 1923; this earned him only £4 in royalties; it played to packed houses, but was staged for just three days. As he continued to mix cement, Juno and the Paycock the following year was even more successful, its two-week run earning him £25. That meant he could give up the labouring and focus fully on the writing, which he did for the next 40 years. Plays were not going to make him wealthy, but he had crossed the threshold.
Precarity and doubt about the viability and reception of their creative endeavours run through the lives of many of our artists, past and present. Holding a mirror to your country will often generate more opprobrium than gratitude and will rarely bring material riches.
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This month 50 years ago, the staging at the Abbey of Tom Murphy’s play The Sanctuary Lamp also generated acrimony. In the play, the character Francisco declares, “what a poxy con, all Christianity! All those predators that have been mass produced out of the loneliness and isolation of people ... They’re like black candles, not giving, drawing a little light out of the world”.
The backlash profoundly affected Murphy, and he retreated from playwrighting for some years. But the vocation, the creative impulses and the furious crafting ultimately continued, and Murphy also had vocal supporters, including, in 1975, the president of Ireland, Cearbhall Ó Dálaigh, who declared The Sanctuary Lamp one of the great Irish plays.
Making a living in that world is a tall order. Amid all the understandable sourness generated by the recent budget decisions, there was a welcome commitment to extend the basic income for artists pilot scheme, with Minister for Public Expenditure Jack Chambers stating: “this Government is now committing to deliver a successor scheme to begin next year”. The pilot project was introduced by former Minister for Arts Catherine Martin in 2022 to run for three years (which was then extended to February 2026), with a €325 a week payment to 2,000 eligible artists and creative workers selected by lottery. The suggestion is that it can be expanded, though Minister for Arts Patrick O’Donovan did say before the budget that the scheme numbers could only be increased if additional funding was secured.
[ There was more to Lady Augusta Gregory than her relationship with YeatsOpens in new window ]
It should be, so it can become something that will distinguish this State as enlightened in supporting and promoting culture by recognising the struggles inherent in many artistic lives, but also the richness those lives generate. As well as that, it makes sound economic sense; a cost-benefit analysis of the pilot scheme by Alma Economics found that for every €1 invested, society receives €1.39 in return, including more than €100 million in social and economic benefits, and that recipients’ arts-related income increased by more than €500 per month on average. This report also noted that the sector is characterised by “persistent low pay, lack of certainty and stability in income, long and often unpaid working hours, and a disproportionately high rate of self-employment”.
A separate report generated within the Department of Arts highlights the impact on the mental health of artists: the pilot scheme “strengthened artists’ professional autonomy, capacity for creative work, and attachment to the arts sector ... contributed positively and substantially to psychological wellbeing”, making them “less likely to feel that they have to struggle to make ends meet and to experience enforced deprivation”.
Like O’Casey, they will be much more likely to get on with their bloody work.
