James "Jemmy" Hope (25 August 1764 – 10 February 1847) was a radical democrat in Ireland who organised among tenant farmers, tradesmen and labourers for the Society of the United Irishmen.

He identified the source of the country's poverty and distress.As a people, we were excluded from any share in framing the laws by which we were governed ... By force the poor were subdued and dispossessed of their interests in the soil; by fiction, the titles of the spoilers were established; and by fraud on the productive industry of future generations, the usurpation was continued.

After the Volunteer movement split on the question of full and immediate Catholic emancipation and was suppressed by the government in 1793, he joined them in the Society of the United Irishmen,[9] albeit with some reservation.

[11] In 1795, he took the United Irish pledge or “test” to "persevere in endeavouring to form a brotherhood of affection among Irishmen of every religious persuasion", and "to obtain an equal, full and adequate representation of all the people of Ireland".

working in parallel with Father James Coigly,[18] he sought to reconcile the Peep o' Day Boys to their traditional enemies, the Catholic Defenders in the cause of what was simply called "The Union".

[20] Hope "remained steadfast" and led a "Spartan band" of weavers and labourers who covered the retreat of the rebels under the command of Henry Joy McCracken at the Battle of Antrim.

Upon the collapse of the general rising, Hope refused to avail of the terms of an amnesty offered by Lord Cornwallis on the grounds that to do so would be "not only a recantation of one’s principles but a tacit acquiescence in the justice of the punishment which had been inflicted on thousands of my unfortunate associates".

[21] In the aftermath of the rebellion young militants, chief among them Robert Emmet (the younger brother of Thomas Addis Emmet) and William Putnam McCabe (son of the Society's founder member, Thomas McCabe) sought to reorganise United Irishmen on a strict military-conspiratorial basis, with its members chosen personally by its officers, meeting as the executive directory.

[23] But when Russell returned from Fort George and brief exile, he was drawn into plans being co-ordinated with McCabe in Paris by Robert Emmet and Anne Devlin (ostensibly his housekeeper) and others on the new Dublin executive.

In February 1803, hopes of being assisted by a rising of the heavily Irish-infiltrated United Britons network in London and in the mill towns of Lancashire and Yorkshire were blasted by the arrest and execution of Edward Despard and by the repression that followed.

[22] Hope made contact with Michael Dwyer (Devlin’s cousin), who still maintained rebel resistance in the Wicklow Mountains, and in April 1803 helped arrange two lengthy conferences with Emmett in Rathfarnham.

But those districts of Antrim where he had previously found "the republican spirit, inherent in the principles of Presbyterian community, kept resistance to arbitrary power still alive"[26] refused the call.

[28] Hope evaded the authorities' attention in the ensuing repression by securing employment with a sympathetic friend from England in Belfast where he eventually benefitted from a political amnesty in 1806.

He also collaborated with Mary Ann McCracken,[29] in assisting the historian R. R. Madden research his monumental The United Irishmen, their lives and times (1842-1860, 11 Vols.).

The headstone was raised by his friends, Henry Joy McCracken’s sister Mary Ann, and the Shankill Road United Irishman Israel Milliken.

[33] The biographer of his friend, Mary-Ann McCracken, Mary McNeill, says of Hope; "He represented the almost inarticulate aspirations of the strongly revolutionary element among the Presbyterian labourers both rural and urban: he was indeed the most radical of the United Irishmen".

[36] The memory of Hope is celebrated by Left republicans,[5] but where his social radicalism places him in relation to the subsequent development of Irish nationalism is disputed.

Sean Cronin, former Chief-of-Staff in the anti-Treaty IRA, proposed that Hope had been to 1798 "what James Connolly was to 1916"[37] -- the reprise of Emmet's rebellion in which the socialist leader tied labour's cause to Irish statehood.