The Society was chaired by Gilbert McIlveen, a founding member of the United Irishmen[5] and counted on the support of Dr. William Drennan who as author of the United Irish test or pledge had called for the "union of power among Irishmen of every religious persuasion";[6] Drennan's sister and political confidant, Martha McTier; Francis, John, and Mary Ann McCracken, brothers and sister to Henry Joy McCracken who in 1798 had led the rebels who killed Earl O'Neill's father in battle at Antrim and was subsequently hanged; Robert Tennent's brother William, a former state prisoner; and Thomas McCabe, whose son William Putnam McCabe was forced into French exile after seeking with Robert Emmet to renew the republican insurrection in 1803.

These had been complete with parades by local Volunteer corps, and resolutions, carried by the new-formed United Irishmen, in favour of Catholic Emancipation and Parliamentary Reform.

[8] Encouraged by MacDonnell and supported by his adoptive family, McCrackens, the musician and collector Edward (Atty) Bunting notated the music of the ten performers.

O'Neill was to instruct poor children from the age of ten, blind like himself, with a view both to preserving his musical legacy and, as harpists, to save his charges from a life of destitution.

[13] In December of that year, O'Neill was led by his twelve blind pupils into dinner marking publication of the second volume of Bunting's Ancient Music of Ireland.

The Irish antiquary, George Petrie, argued that the Society had been flawed in conception:[19]The effort of the people of the North to perpetuate the existence of the harp in Ireland by trying to give a harper's skill to a number of poor blind boys was at once a benevolent and a patriotic one; but it was a delusion.

The selection of blind boys, without any greater regard for their musical capacities than the possession of the organ of hearing, for a calling which doomed them to a wandering life, depending for existence mainly if not wholly on the sympathies of the poorer classes, and necessarily conducive to intemperate habits, was not a well-considered benevolence, and should never have had any fair hope of success.In 1818, it was reported that “several blind minstrels educated in the seminary at Belfast" were "wandering through different parts of the country", and, by "affording a pleasing and harmless amusement to the people who hear them", were able to support themselves.

Accounts of the Society's financial difficulties and of O'Neill's plight ("the last Minstrel of Erin, unfriended, exigent, and bent in years")[25] were submitted in June and November 1814 to the Belfast Commercial Chronicle.

[30] The News Letter, 15 April 1828, published a glowing tribute to the Society's academy, and of "the inimitable Rainey", that had appeared in the Calcutta newspaper The Bengal Hurkaru and Chronicle:[31]We can confidently assure the friends and benevolent supporters of the patriotic and humane establishment, that the prosperity of the Institution has never for a moment been forgotten or unattended to.

The contributors, by all accounts, have now the satisfaction of knowing, that they have effectually restored the ancient melodies, the nearly lost airs of the Emerald Isle, by the encouragement given by them to the long–neglected and forgotten Harper.The News Letter conceded that the Society's friends in Ireland, were not able "to contend" with the generosity with which its patrons in India responded to such reports.

In the wake of the Act of Union and subsequent removal of many landowning families to England, the gentry in Ireland were "too scarce, and too little national, to encourage itinerant harpers, as of old.

Failing to commit himself on an issue that increasingly was to associate interest in Irish culture with Catholic-majority separatism, repeal of the Act of Union, he lost by a wide margin.

[38] In 1856, The Illustrated London News, reported that the "ancient national music of Ireland is kept alive by a few practitioners of a very humble kind, who wander about in their own country chiefly playing to parties assemble in taverns".

The only "gentleman harper" remaining was Patrick Byrne, of Farney, County Monaghan, who some years previously had had the honour of performing before the Queen Victoria at Balmoral.

Rediscovering the older wire-stringed harp of the kind played by O'Neill and Rainey, the HHSI seeks return "to the world the true sound of the oldest Irish music".