This essay examines modern Irish and Northern Irish engagements with Sophocles’ Antigone as a sustained rethinking of tragedy under historical pressure. It argues that the tradition begins not with an adaptation but with an absence: W. B. Yeats’s refusal to stage Antigone. Yeats’s classicism, oriented toward ritual order, hierarchical authority, and tragic transformation, establishes Greek tragedy in Ireland as a privileged aesthetic resource while simultaneously defining the limits of that inheritance. Antigone, with its ethical constancy and resistance to metamorphosis, lies beyond Yeats’s tragic economy, even as his work furnishes later dramatists with a symbolic vocabulary of fate, authority, and extremity. Against this Yeatsian architecture of tragic order, the essay traces three Northern Irish recalibrations of Antigone. Tom Paulin’s The Riot Act (1984), written during the Troubles, transforms Sophocles’ play into an inward drama of unionist self-interrogation, using Ulster vernacular to expose the ethical violence embedded in inherited authority. Seamus Heaney’s The Burial at Thebes (2004) responds to this accusatory mode by restoring deliberation and civic plurality, reimagining tragedy as a space where conflicting moral claims remain legible without being resolved. Owen McCafferty’s Antigone (2008) completes the trajectory by relocating tragedy to the aftermath of war, shifting attention from heroic defiance to governance, labor, and the persistence of grief in everyday life. Taken together, these revisions mark a movement from tragic order to tragic empathy. Rather than seeking transcendence or resolution, the Irish Antigone tradition increasingly understands tragedy as an ethical practice: an attentiveness to division, responsibility, and survival in societies shaped by political violence and its enduring aftermath.