Sean O'Casey's (1880-1964) comitragic drama Juno and the Paycock (1924) is an indictment of the civil war and the folly that precipitated it. The play focuses on the Boyle family, dwelling in a Dublin tenement. The father, "Captain" Boyle, an irresponsible roisterer, spends his time in the local pubs, accompanied by his sly, parasitical buddy, Joxer Daly. Boyle's wife, Juno, the play's long-suffering, sharp-tongued heroine, struggles mightily against her husband's fecklessness and the impoverished conditions in which they live. Her two adult children are a source of additional anxiety. John is an IRA veteran, who has lost an arm and had his hip shattered, along with his nerves, fighting for the Irish cause. The daughter, Mary, is on strike, protesting a fellow worker's firing. Both children are fierce believers in "principle," but Juno's response to her son summarizes her basic pragmatism: "Ah, you lost your best principle, me boy, when you lost your arm. Them's the only sort of principles that's any good to a workin' man."

When the family receives news of a legacy left to them, life seems to be taking a turn for the better. But the legacy turns out to be illusory; Mary is impregnated and abandoned by her lover, and John is killed by his Republican comrades when it appears that he has informed on a friend. In the final scene Juno and Mary leave the flat, from which creditors have removed all the furniture, as Juno, devastated by the death of her son, delivers her anguished plea: "Sacred Heart of Jesus, take away our murtherin' hate and give us Thine own eternal love." Her exit is followed by the drunken return of Boyle and Joxer, where the captain delivers his famous curtain line, "I'm telling you, Joxer, th' whole worl's in a terrible state o' chassis."

The "chassis" of the civil war looms in the background and, in the killing of Johnny, the foreground of the play, but the war's malevolent presence is subsumed under a larger purpose. As the Irish writer James Stephens expressed it, the play "is an orchestrated hymn against all poverty and hate."

Julia O'Faolain's (1932- ) No Country for Young Men (1980) is an ambitious attempt to see the civil war as part of a recurring pattern in Irish history and mythology. The story contains two plots: one set in 1921-22, on the brink of the civil war, and the other in 1979, when the political repercussions of "the Troubles" of Northern Ireland are echoing throughout all of Ireland. The connecting link between the two intricately interwoven plots is Judith Clancy, an ex-nun with a history of mental disease. Released by her order, the aged Judith has come to live with Grainne and Michael O'Malley, married cousins, both of them related to Judith. An Irish-American group sympathetic to the IRA is planning to produce a documentary film about the fate of an Irish American, John (Sparky) Driscoll, who was murdered in Ireland in 1922. Driscoll had been sent over by an Irish-American group to monitor the impending war and to advise them as to which side the group should support. During his stay, Driscoll was a frequent visitor to the family of Judith Clancy. In 1979, James Duffy arrives to do background research for the film. A top priority for him is to interview Judith about her knowledge of Driscoll's fate. Another cousin, Owen Roe O'Malley, a prominent member of the Irish Parliament is concerned that Judith's interview will tarnish the memory of his father, Owen O'Malley, who fought on the side of the Irregulars and later, like Eamon De Valera, became prime minister. The parallels in the plot become even more pronounced when we learn, through the flashbacks experienced by Judith, that Judith's sister, Kathleen, had fallen in love with Driscoll during his visit, just as, almost 60 years later, Grainne O'Malley begins a passionate love affair with the American visitor, James Duffy. The parallelism extends to the tragic resolution of the two plots and to their convergence in the tortured mind of Judith.

The title No Country for Young Men is an allusion to the opening line of William Butler Yeats's celebrated poem "Sailing to Byzantium": "This is no country for old men." The allusion ironically states an important theme of the novel, the role of women in Irish society. The key figures are Judith, Grainne, and Judith's sister, Kathleen. The three are trapped in a society where church, state, and culture combine not only to subordinate the woman but to characterize her as the source of evil. The novel suggests that the oppressed condition of women extends back to Celtic mythology, reflected in the ancient story of Grainne and Diarmuid, lovers whose affair led to war, for which Grainne is then held responsible. In the same myth, Cormac is the name of Grainne's father; in the novel he is Grainne's teenage son, who has already been indoctrinated into the world of the IRA. Cormac is an example of the young men, conditioned for violence and bloodshed, who will continue the seemingly endless conflict. Grainne is the representative woman, for whom there seems to be no place but exile. Both Juno and the Paycock and No Country for Young Men conclude with women leaving, implying the need for them to disassociate themselves from the heritage of violence.

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