This opening chapter situates O’Casey in the Dublin of his time, describing the existence of O’Casey’s Protestant family in Dublin’s Northside. The chapter contrasts that lower-middle-class existence with the disease and insecurity of the slum areas of Dublin. We encounter the political and cultural sensibilities of the Irish capital’s Catholic working-class population, a population that profoundly affected O’Casey’s life and work. The chapter shows O’Casey to be a writer who moved between and across social and cultural groupings in Dublin, with this part of the volume highlighting the Irish capital’s differing religious and political affiliations in the early twentieth century.