As one who did well in the States he tends to use them as the source of Di ex Machinis to resolve the problems of his Irish characters.
Of the others, I should say here that their various di ex machina include Tarot cards (The Greater Trumps),.
In John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728), the ludicrously contrived last-minute rescue of Maceath works as a deliberate deflation of opera’s various dii ex machinis.
Apparitions, marvelous coincidences, and various dei ex machinis endow these true-life fictions with spiritual qualities, useful as new secular verification that God’s plan is.
For when a book is of absorbing interest without a single startling incident, without a murder, without even an elopement (except a very minor one mentioned in the first chapter), and deprived of the adventitious aids of railway accidents, shipwrecks, or other dii ex machina, we may be sure that there is much nature and much thought in it. Were there not it must infallibly be dull, and The Egoist is never dull.