[2] He received some early education at a hedge school run by a man called Mairtin Gunn; showing aptitude for Latin and Greek he was then tutored by his Jesuit parish priest, Andrew Cassin, with a view to entering the priesthood.

[2] Bishop Sweetman, a probable Jacobite sympathiser who had been arrested in 1751 on political grounds, chose the Dominican college in Seville, Spain for Murphy to complete his theological studies.

[5] A contemporary description by Musgrave said that Murphy was then "about forty-five years old, light complexioned, bald-pated, and about five feet nine inches high [...] uniting strength with agility".

The 1798 rebellion was principally organised by the Society of United Irishmen, a group of political reformers and radicals based in Belfast and Dublin and originally founded in 1791 by William Drennan.

Secondly, the British government was granting political asylum to large numbers of French Catholics fleeing from religious persecution in France, including priests, monks and nuns.

For all of these reasons, the Catholic bishops in Ireland were understandably afraid that the solution advocated by the United Irishmen would prove far worse than any of the problems they meant to solve.

[6] By 1797 the situation was particularly acute in Wexford, where hardship caused by fluctuations in grain prices became an extremely powerful United Irishmen recruiting tool.

When combined with rumours of a plot by the Orange Order to systematically massacre Irish Catholics, this created a "wave of hysteria" among the rural peasantry.

In Monageer parish Cogley was happy to comply, taking no part in later events, but Caulfield later characterised Murphy as "giddy", claiming he had often been locally "reprimanded and threatened".

[5] On the afternoon of 26 May 1798, news of two events reached north Wexford: the first was a massacre of suspected United Irishmen by loyalists at Carnew and by the garrison at Dunlavin; this seemed to verify rumours circulating in the previous months of a plot to kill Catholics.

[9] On the evening of the 28th, a patrol of some twenty cavalry from the Camolin Yeomanry had been sent to investigate a report of an attack on the house of a Mrs Piper at Tincurry near Scarawalsh, in which her son-in-law was killed; they found the road blocked at the townland of the Harrow by a group of farmers armed with pikes.

Eluding the crown forces by passing through the Scullogue Gap, Fr John Murphy and other leaders tried to spread the rebellion across the country by marching into Kilkenny and towards the midlands.

A single portrait exists of Murphy, now kept at Boolavogue: this was produced in the mid-19th century by a Dublin artist based on a contemporary pencil sketch found at his lodgings in Tomnaboley after his death.

Kavanagh, also depicted the rebel priests as fighting for "faith and fatherland", rather than stressing their status as United Irishmen sympathisers siding with parishioners against the express orders of their bishops.