Catholic Committee (Ireland)
Members briefly reconvened the following year when a new British Viceroy, William Fitzwilliam, raised hopes of further reform, including lifting the sacramental bar to Catholics entering the Irish Parliament.
In 1760, at a meeting at the Elephant Tavern on Essex Street, Dublin, Wyse submitted a plan for a more permanent Catholic Committee, made up of clergy, nobility, and representatives of the people.
The committee did have an early success, organising a campaign of non-payment and of court challenges to the system of "quarterage", by which exclusively Protestant corporations levied surcharges upon Catholic merchants, traders and artisans.
Together with Arthur James Plunkett, seventh earl of Fingall, Anthony Preston, eleventh Viscount Gormanston, and a number of senior bishops, Kenmare believed that redress was best achieved by maintaining the confidence of the Dublin Castle and London administrations.
Kenmare demonstrated his loyalty by helping to recruit the soldiers in Ireland to fight for the Crown in the American Colonies in the 1770s and by supporting the authorities as they suppressed Whiteboy agrarian protest in the 1780s.
The "Papists Act" did not grant freedom of worship, but did allow Catholics on taking a modified oath that abjured the temporal, but not the spiritual, authority of the Pope, to purchase land, and join the army.
[8] In February 1791 elections to the committee from the counties and from the five Dublin parishes brought a dramatic change in its composition, with aspiring middle-class representatives now in the majority and clearly outnumbering the rural gentry delegates.
[9] Stirred by news of revolution and reform in France and dissatisfied with the moderation of committee, in October some forty members, including many in the new intake, formed a separate Catholic Society with Theobald McKenna as their secretary.
They published the Declaration of the Catholic Society of Dublin to promote unanimity among Irishmen and remove religious prejudices, written by McKenna, demanding total repeal of the penal laws as a matter of right.
In Dublin, Tone was a leading member of the Society of United Irishmen first formed in October 1791 by his Presbyterian ("Dissenter") friends in Belfast, in the midst of the town's enthusiasm for the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and its defence by Thomas Paine.
The committee's instructions underscored the democratic spirit of the exercise: "men appointed by others must hold themselves accountable to those from whom they derive their trust and must therefore regulate their conduct by the standard of general opinion".
On a motion of the Lisburn linen merchant Luke Teeling (advised by Samuel Neilson of the Belfast United Irish Society) the Convention demanded the total emancipation of Catholics, the lifting of all their remaining disabilities both civil and political.
[20] The delegates chosen to carry the petition to London made a point of travelling through Belfast, where Presbyterian supporters insisted on removing the horses from their carriages and pulling them by hand over the Long Bridge into the town.
This lifted most their civil disabilities: Catholics could be admitted to guilds and corporations, take degrees on Trinity College, be called as barristers and serve as army officers and, most controversially of all, could carry arms.
The government informer Samuel Turner (himself a delegate from Newry) reported in June 1797 that while they were still acknowledged as members of the "National Committee" of the United Irishmen meeting in Dublin, they did not attend.
An agent of the French Committee of Public Safety, Jackson had been having meetings with Tone in the prison cell of Archibald Hamilton Rowan then serving time for distributing Drennan's seditious appeal to Volunteers.
