The centenary of the rebellion in 1898 saw its legacy disputed by nationalists who wished to restore a legislature in Dublin, by republicans who invoked the name of Tone in the cause of complete separation and independence, and by unionists opposed to all measures of Irish self-government.

[10] The interests of the Crown were meanwhile secured by a Viceregal administration accountable, not to the legislature in Dublin, but to the King and his ministers in London (and which also having boroughs in its pocket reduced to a third the number of Commons seats open to electoral contest).

[13][14] Volunteers, especially in the north where Presbyterians and other Protestant Dissenters had flocked to their ranks, immediately sought to build upon this grant of legislative independence by agitating for the abolition of the pocket boroughs and an extension of the franchise.

In October 1791, amidst public celebration of the French Revolution, a group of Volunteer veterans invited an address from Wolfe Tone, a Protestant secretary to Dublin's Catholic Committee.

[25] Anticipating war with the new French Republic, George III received a delegation from the convention (including Tone) at Windsor, and the British government pressed the Irish Parliament to match Westminster's Roman Catholic Relief Act 1791.

As it did so, William Drennan's "test" or pledge, calling for "a union of power among Irishmen of every religious persuasion",[33] was administered to artisans, journeymen and shopkeepers, many of whom had maintained their own Jacobin clubs,[34] and to tenant farmers and their market-town allies who had organised against the Protestant gentry in secret fraternities.

[38] By the 1790s, borrowing, like the United Irish societies (and, from 1795, their nemesis the Orange Institution), from the lodge structure and ceremonial of freemasonry,[39][40] this semi-insurrectionary phenomenon had regenerated as the largely but—with some latter-day adjustments to their oaths—not exclusively Catholic, Defenders.

[41]: 467–477 Originating as "fleets" of young men who contended with Protestant Peep o' Day Boys for the control of tenancies and employment in the linen-producing region of north Armagh,[42][43] the Defenders organised across the southern counties of Ulster and into the Irish midlands.

[45] Encountering a political outlook more Jacobite than Jacobin,[46][47] and speaking freely to the grievances of tithes, taxes and rents,[48][16]: 229–230  United agents sought to convince Defenders of something they had only "vaguely" considered, namely the need to separate Ireland from England and to secure its "real as well as nominal independence".

[53]: 88 The initiative passed to the Leinster directory which had recruited two radically disaffected members of the Patriot opposition: Lord Edward FitzGerald, who brought with him experience of the American war, and Arthur O'Connor (later, undistinguished, as an officer of Napoleon's Irish Legion).

His "memorials" on the situation in Ireland came to the attention of Director Lazare Carnot, and by May, General Henri Clarke, the Irish-descendant head of the War Ministry's Bureau Topographique, had drafted an invasion plan.

[77]: 34–39  The Viceroy, Lord Camden, came under increasing pressure from hardline Irish MPs, led by Speaker John Foster, to crack down on the growing disorder in the south and midlands and arrest the Dublin leadership.

[77]: 42  The situation changed when an informer, Thomas Reynolds, produced Fitzgerald's report on manpower with its suggestion that over a quarter of a million men across Ulster, Leinster and Munster were preparing to join the "revolutionary army".

The Irish government learned from Reynolds that a meeting of the Leinster Provincial Committee and Directory had been set for 10 March in the Dublin house of wool merchant Oliver Bond, where a motion for an immediate rising would be tabled.

Overall command of the army was transferred from Ralph Abercromby to Gerard Lake who turned his attention to Leinster and Munster where from Ulster his troops' reputation for public floggings, half-hanging, pitch-capping and other interrogative refinements preceded him.

[79][77]: 57–58 Faced with the breaking-up of their entire system, Fitzgerald, joined by Samuel Neilson (publisher in Belfast of the Society paper Northern Star, recently released from Kilmainham Prison), and by John and Henry Sheares, resolved on a general uprising for 23 May.

[95]: 179–224 Stories of Catholic desertion at the Battle of Ballynahinch were common,[98] although a more sympathetic account has Defenders decamping only after Munro rejected their proposal for a night attack on the riotous soldiery in the town as taking an "ungenerous advantage".

[98] In the southwest, in Munster, there were just two skirmishes: on 19 June near Clonakilty in West Cork, the "Battle of the Big Cross"[101] and, after the principal action was over, on 24 July, an attempt to free prisoners at Ninemilehouse in County Tipperary.

[121] In February 1798, the British commander-in-chief General Sir Ralph Abercromby publicly rebuked his predecessor, Henry Luttrell, Lord Carhampton, for bequeathing an army "in a state of licentiousness, which must render it formidable to everyone but the enemy".

At Ballynahinch, where legend has Betsy Gray mounted with a green flag upon white horse, the father of the future Lord Kelvin reported seeing women remain on the field and perform deeds as "valiant as the men".

Once confident that the rebellion had been contained, Cornwallis, and his Chief Secretary, Lord Castlereagh, resisted pressure from the Irish Parliament to proceed against the other directory leaders held as state prisoners.

[52]: 122–123  Under terms negotiated by Thomas Addis Emmet, William James MacNeven, and Arthur O'Connor, and confident that government informers had left little to disclose, the prisoners promised to give a full account of their activities to a secret House of Commons committee in return for exile, into which they were released in 1802.

[172] Under the Acts of Union, Irish representation, purged of many of the pocket boroughs but still narrow and exclusively Protestant,[173] was transferred to Westminster, now styled as the Parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.

Hopes of outside assistance were abandoned in 1802 when, what Emmett acknowledged as a "similar attempt in England" (the "Despard Plot") was crushed,[177] and when French forces under Humbert were assigned by Napoleon, not to the liberation of Ireland, but to the re-enslavement of Haiti.

[164][186] Daniel O'Connell who, enrolled in a yeomanry corps, had sat out the rebellion in his native County Kerry,[187] retorted that the United Irishmen had been the dupes, not of Catholics intent on driving Protestants from Ireland, but of a government seeking a pretext for abolishing the Irish Parliament.

[187] In 1831, Thomas Moore, who, citing the need to engage with the Presbyterian north, refused a parliamentary nomination from O'Connell's a Repeal Association,[189]: 233  presented his Life and Death of Lord Edward Fitzgerald as a "justification of the men of '98 – the ultimi Romanorum of our country".

[194] Finding Protestants loath to acknowledge their connection to those she saw as having sealed Tone's union of creeds on "the battle field and scaffold", Alice Milligan had to confine her commemorative displays in Belfast to Catholic districts.

Instead, it was from nationalist west Belfast, that they led a procession to McArt's Fort,[200] the site overlooking the town where in June 1795 Wolfe Tone and members of the United Irish northern executive took an oath "never to desist in our efforts until we had subverted the authority of England over our country".

[205]Supported by a reversion in the scholarship of rebellion to "a romantic, celebratory style of history writing",[206] and by criticism not only of Kavanagh's interpretation but also, with its heavy reliance on the available loyalist sources, of Thomas Pakenham's celebrated The Year of Liberty (1969),[207][208] the official commemorations emphasised the United Irishmen's non-sectarian, enlightened, French and American-inspired, democratic ideals.

[206] Contrary to what it characterised as the "sectarian and narrow-minded folklore" of the rebellion, The Irish Times noted that even in Wexford, typically associated with fighting priests, Protestants had played a leading role.