In an example of dramatic irony, Nora and Cathleen (and readers) are aware from the beginning of the play that Michael has most likely drowned, but his mother Maurya is not. When the two girls receive a bundle of clothing from the young priest—who tells them that they were found on a dead man off the coast of mainland Ireland and could be Michael’s—they decide to hide it from their mother. When Nora asks if they should open it, Cathleen responds:
Give me the ladder, and I’ll put them up in the turf-loft, the way she won’t know of them at all, and maybe when the tide turns she’ll be going down to see would he be floating from the east.
This passage hints at the dramatic irony that is present through the rest of the play—Maurya still has hope that Michael could be “floating from the east” and return home to the family, while Nora and Cathleen are aware that the evidence of Michael’s death is sitting in the turf-loft (where turf—or Irish peat—is stored as a source of fuel for their home).
The irony increases after Nora and Cathleen open the bundle to discover that the clothing remnants are, in fact, Michael’s, and again decide to hide this fact from their mother. It’s only after Maurya accepts the fact that Michael is dead that Nora and Cathleen tell her about his clothes.
Bartley’s death in the story is an example of situational irony for a few different reasons. First, as Nora points out, the young priest told Maurya before Bartley decided to leave for the sea that “the Almighty God wouldn’t leave her destitute with no son living.” The priest’s certainty that Bartley will survive—and his invocation of God, in whom Maurya places (at least part of) her faith—makes Bartley’s death ironic and also deeply tragic. In having the young priest be incorrect, Synge is also highlighting how, for island-dwellers like those on the Aran Islands, the sea is more powerful than God.
The way in which Bartley dies is also an example of situational irony. While he believes setting sail to sell his horses at a fair will bring his family financial security, the horses themselves actually lead to his death (as one of them knocks him into the sea). The irony comes across in Maurya’s plea to Bartley not to go:
If it was a hundred horses, or a thousand horses you had itself, what is the price of a thousand horses against a son where there is one son only?
While Maurya could see the irony in Bartley prioritizing the possible sale of horses over his own life, Bartley could not, and, in dying, leaves the family without a son to provide for them.
