The Lieutenant of Inishmore

Donny is a middle-aged man who is taking care of his son Padraic’s cat while he is in Northern Ireland with the INLA. Like Davey, he is also innocent in the presumed death of his son’s cat. When Donny calls Padraic and catches him in the middle of “work,” the normalcy of their father-son relationship banter is juxtaposed humorously with Padraic’s violent occupation, highlighting the absurdity of violence as normal. Their phone conversation also suggests that there is no animosity between them, aside from a little paternal criticism about Padraic’s recent failed bombings, which makes Padraic’s easy willingness to execute his own father hilariously preposterous.

Donny and Davey act as a comic duo, both civilians with no paramilitary aspirations who are dragged into the middle of a tense, violent infighting situation. When Donny and Davey banter, Donny is an older and slightly wiser voice that tells the teenager that his ideas are ridiculous, but he also goes along with Davey’s ludicrous idea to shoe polish a cat and believes Davey’s claim that he has a natural alarm clock reliable enough to stake their lives on. Donny is less wide-eyed and innocent than Davey, and he takes advantage of his naivete by accusing him of killing Wee Thomas and making Davey a coconspirator and potential scapegoat. Donny handles their crisis by getting drunk, a stereotype of Irishness that highlights the absurdity of the situation in which they attempt to save their lives by painting an orange cat black.

Padraic, known as “Mad” Padraic, is a 21-year-old second lieutenant in the INLA. Padraic is the title character and protagonist, an antihero whose actions and objectives drive the action of the play forward. When Padraic decides to rush home, he sends all the other characters spinning. He is from Inishmore, which is in western Ireland, but he joined a paramilitary group in Northern Ireland because it provides an outlet for his love of violence. His name strikes fear in Davey because Padraic has been sadistic since childhood, known to inflict violence on anyone who crosses him. Now, he can be a sadist and call it patriotism, although he ended up in the INLA because the IRA rejected him for being too erratic. Davey and Donny have no doubt that Padraic will kill them, and Padraic shows no warmth or leniency for his father.

Padraic loves and adores his pet cat; Wee Thomas has been his only friend for 15 years, which demonstrates how he has distanced himself from humanity. Once he learns that his cat is dead, Padraic is determined to blame someone and extract justice. Wee Thomas is his soft spot and his only point of connection with human beings. He ends James’s torture before slicing off his nipples because James pretends that he has a cat he loves. He impulsively kisses Mairead after first rejecting her when she gives him happy news about Wee Thomas. In fact, his awkwardly surprised reaction to kissing Mairead suggests that it might be the first time he has ever kissed someone.

Padraic’s persona is a performance of gangster movie tropes, adopting a double-gun, overkill signature as a dramatic style. He relishes finding reasons to torture and kill, and his inability to be selective in choosing his victims makes him a liability to the INLA. He bonds with Mairead as a violent, cat-loving, kindred spirit, and he decides to marry her and form a splinter group in the name of the only thing he really cares about—not Ireland, but his beloved cat. Ironically, he is killed as revenge for inadvertently murdering Mairead’s well-loved cat.

At 16, Mairead has been dreaming about joining the INLA for years. When she was 11 and 16-year-old Padraic was leaving to enlist, she begged him to take her along. She sings folk songs that romanticize the paramilitaries, and she inserts herself into the narrative upon learning that Padraic is returning. She sees Padraic as her ticket out of her tiny rural hometown and into the INLA, where she believes she can command respect.

As the only female character in the play, Mairead struggles to be taken seriously. She cuts her hair short and rejects expressions of traditional femininity as a way of avoiding being treated like a girl, and she uses violence to force others to give her respect and agency. But up to this point, it hasn’t worked. As a self-trained sniper, Mairead can shoot a cow’s eye out with an air rifle from 60 feet, but she receives nothing but mockery for it. Padraic dismisses her at 11 and rejects her advances at 16 with the implication that he isn’t interested because he doesn’t think she’s pretty. But after Padraic kisses her and becomes smitten, Mairead saves his life, and they briefly become an Irish Bonnie and Clyde. She finds the empowerment she was seeking as his partner and even allows herself to express femininity by changing into a dress. But Mairead is commanding all on her own and doesn’t need Padraic to give her authority.

Although she seems to love Padraic as he loves her, Mairead loves her cat more. She kills Padraic after learning he killed Sir Roger and decides not to run off and join the INLA. With Padraic dead, Mairead becomes the lieutenant of Inishmore. She finds killing boring, which makes her dangerous, as she has no qualms about doing it again if necessary. Her threat to investigate the death of her cat is a promise of more violence, and since the cat is named after Irish nationalist Sir Roger Casement, executed by the British in 1916, contributing to the feline Sir Roger’s killing becomes an issue of nationalism.

Christy and his two junior goons, Joey and Brendan, have traveled to Inishmore as part of a convoluted plan to lure Padraic back to his hometown by killing his cat so they can kill him. Joey is moping and upset that he had to help kill a cat, which he complains is more than he signed up for when he joined the INLA. This is ironic, since being in the INLA means committing acts of violent terrorism. Joey is the only one who seems to have a conscience about killing innocent victims, and Christy and Brendan mock him and then nearly kill him for continuing to press the issue.

Christy uses nationalist rhetoric and the idea of a free Ireland to justify the unsavory things they have to do, typically in illogical ways. For instance, Christy justifies killing the cat by claiming that Oliver Cromwell, who led the British Commonwealth in the 17th century, killed plenty of cats. He also invokes Bloody Sunday, even though, as Brendan points out, no cats were killed on Bloody Sunday. Christy tries to reference ideology that he erroneously attributes to Marx because the INLA was formed with socialist goals, but when his henchmen question him about it, he insults and threatens them to make them fall in line. Christy and Padraic know each other, and Padraic greets him as a friend.

Christy reveals that the reason he wears an eyepatch is that Padraic—presumably accidentally—shot out his eye with a crossbow, and Christy still holds a grudge. As Christy explains, the INLA wants Padraic dead because he has not only been talking about forming a splinter group, but he goes after drug dealers with punishment beatings and killings without considering that some of the drug dealers are earning money for the INLA. Although the order to kill Padraic seems to be legitimate, Christy has also chosen the most sadistic way to carry it out by first killing his beloved cat. With this, Christy seems to be using the order as an opportunity for revenge.