Peter Flynn

Peter Flynn is Nora Clitheroe's elderly uncle, a tenant in the crowded Dublin tenement block that forms the world of The Plough and the Stars. He holds a nominal membership in the Irish National Foresters, a fraternal organisation with ceremonial rather than military significance. The organisation's green coat, plumed hat, and ceremonial sword define him more than any action he ever takes. O'Casey introduces Peter almost immediately as a figure of comic vanity: a small, irritable man whose sense of self-worth rests entirely on an outfit and a title that command no genuine authority. He is not a villain or a tragic figure in the conventional sense; he is something more pointed — a fool who has mistaken the costume of patriotism for the thing itself.

Peter's arc, such as it is, amounts to a sustained deflation. His core motivation is the desire for respect — to be acknowledged as a man of standing within the nationalist community. Yet every scene systematically denies him that acknowledgement. He is mocked before the Rising, peripheral during it, and unscathed after it, a trajectory that itself serves as the joke and the critique. Where characters like Jack Clitheroe pursue nationalist ideals to a fatal conclusion, Peter pursues the appearance of those ideals to no conclusion at all. His journey is static precisely because O'Casey intends it to be: Peter does not grow, learn, or sacrifice. He simply persists, shouting and sulking, while history moves around him without requiring his participation.

The feud over the Foresters' uniform in Act I establishes Peter's character with brutal economy. The Covey's mockery of the green coat sends Peter into sputtering, near-incoherent fury — a fury so disproportionate that it immediately signals how much of his identity is invested in mere cloth and brass. The comedy is sharp, but O'Casey ensures the audience registers the pathos underneath: this is a man with nothing else.

The pub scene in Act II is the play's most concentrated piece of irony. While a disembodied voice — the Voice of the Speaker, channelling Pearse's incendiary rhetoric about blood sacrifice — rises from offstage, Peter sits inside drinking. The juxtaposition is unmistakable: the men most adorned with nationalist symbolism are literally turning their backs on the nationalist event unfolding yards away. Peter is not unusual here; the whole group is condemned by the same irony. But Peter, in his Foresters' regalia, wears the indictment most visibly.

In the later acts, as the Rising produces looting, death, and Nora's breakdown, Peter retreats into self-pity and ineffectual rage. He does not help Nora, does not confront the violence, and does not mourn Mollser with any apparent depth. He emerges from the chaos alive and essentially unchanged — the single most devastating judgment O'Casey can render on him.

With The Covey, Peter shares the play's most consistently comic dynamic: a running ideological and personal feud in which The Covey deploys Marxist contempt and Peter responds with spluttering outrage. Neither man has any grip on political reality, making them mirror images O'Casey uses to satirise both strands of empty radicalism simultaneously.

With Nora, Peter is a domestic liability rather than a source of support. Nora manages the household and, eventually, suffers genuinely and catastrophically for the Rising. Peter's tantrums merely add friction to a home already under enormous pressure, and his survival intact when Nora is destroyed emotionally is a quiet structural irony O'Casey never makes explicit but cannot be missed.

With Fluther, Peter finds a drinking companion whose earthy, pragmatic selfishness is at least honest about what it is. Fluther does not dress his self-interest in ceremonial uniform, which makes Peter's posturing look all the more absurd by contrast.

With Bessie Burgess, Peter's petty clashes in the tenement gain retrospective weight once Bessie dies shielding Nora. Her heroism — Protestant, Unionist, and entirely unrehearsed — throws into relief just how hollow Peter's lifelong performance of patriotic virtue has been.