Act 1 of Seán O'Casey's play The Plough and the Stars, which is set in a tenement house in Dublin in 1915, begins with a scene in which a carpenter named Fluther Good installs a new lock on the door. He enters into conversation about Jack and Nora Clitheroe, the couple who live in the tenement house, with their charwoman, Mrs. Gogan. At some point, a character called "the Covey" enters the house and announces that there is to be a demonstration on behalf of Irish liberation that night. He refers to the demonstration sarcastically as a ceremony in which "political baptismal vows" will be renewed. Upon hearing this, Fluther remarks,

There's no reason to bring religion into it. I think we ought to have as great a regard for religion as we can, so as to keep it out of as many things as possible.

Fluther's sentiment is crucial to O'Casey's depiction of the Irish political landscape in the period leading up to and including the 1916 Easter Rising. The comment by Fluther suggests that the Irish liberation movement became conflated with religious aims and modes of loyalty and hints that religion would be best kept out of the struggle.

Casey's treatment of religion is central to his understanding of the forces that informed the movement for and against Irish liberation. It does not function merely as a means of deference to doctrinal dictates but also as a vital source of social cohesion. We see this in when Bessie Burgess, a woman who sells fruit on the street, remarks,

I attend me place o'worshp, anyhow . . . not like someo'them that go to neither church, chapel nor meetin'-house. . . . If me son was home from th' trenches he'd see me righted.

This quotation reminds us that Irish forces were fighting for the British Empire during the period of the Easter Rising and that the war was, in that respect, a means of holding the empire together. Within Ireland, Protestantism (represented by "the chapel" and the "meetin-house") and Roman Catholicism (represented by "the church") had to compete and, to some extent, fuse with political movements for and against Irish liberation. The question, as O'Casey, depicts it, is a matter of conflicting loyalties.

The play represents a series of such conflicting loyalties: between religion and nation, between social classes, between men and women, between nation and empire, but also between public-spirited loyalty to Ireland on one hand and devotion to private relationships on the other. For Jack Clitheroe, the emotionally conflicted protagonist of the play, ultimately,

Ireland is greater than a wife.