Myles (or Miles) Byrne (20 March 1780 – 24 January 1862) was an insurgent leader in Wexford in the Irish Rebellion of 1798 and a fighter in the continued guerrilla struggle against British Crown forces in the Wicklow Hills until 1802.

Myles (he usually spelt his name Miles) Byrne was born in the townland of Ballylusk near Monaseed, County Wexford, Ireland, on 20 March 1780, into a Catholic farming family.

Keeping command of a small band, Byrne seized Goresbridge (23 June) but had to deplore the murder of several prisoners and other atrocities committed by his men in revenge for the torture and executions that had been visited upon the peasantry by the yeomanry and government militia.

In July 1803, the plans unravelled when Michael Dwyer (Devlin's cousin), still holding out in Wicklow, recognised that there were neither the promised arms nor convincing proof of an intended French landing.

In the north Thomas Russell and James Hope found no enthusiasm for a renewal of the struggle in what in '98 had been the strongest United Irish and Catholic Defender districts.

But at a time when Byrne was convinced that "all Catholic Ireland" was "ready to rise the moment a rallying point was offered",[8] the Irish exiles (Thomas Addis Emmet and Arthur O'Connor chief among them) could not deflect the First Consul from other priorities.

[10] An introduction to the Prince de Broglie, then vice-president of the Chamber of Deputies and two audiences with the Minister of War, Marshal Henri Clarke, the Duke of Feltre, (a son of Irish parents, who had advised Wolfe Tone) contributed to the latter's decision to quash the deportation order.

Returned to active military service in 1828, he distinguished himself in the French expedition to Morea (as did his fellow United Irishman, William Corbet)[12] during the Greek War of Independence.

[1] In the 1840s, Byrne was Paris correspondent for The Nation in Dublin,[13] the Young Irelander paper that under the early direction of Thomas David did much to rehabilitate the memory of the United Irishmen.

[16] Against the portrayal of '98 as a series of disjointed, unconnected risings, Byrne's memoirs presented the United Irishmen as a cohesive revolutionary organisation whose aim of a democratic, secular, republic had captured the allegiance of a great mass of the Irish people.

That distinction is probably owed to an 1844 calotype by the pioneer photographer Henry Fox Talbot of the Irish poet (and biographer of Wolfe Tone) Thomas Moore.

[17] (In 1821 Byrne had refused to attend a St Patrick's day dinner Moore had organised in Paris because of the presence of Wellesley Pole Long, a nephew of the Duke of Wellington).