[1] He moved to Dublin where he became a printer, later publishing (as titular proprietor) The Press, a United Irish paper established in September 1797 by Arthur O'Connor and William Sampson.
[3] When Finnerty was taken to the pillory he was accompanied by the leading United Irishmen, Lord Edward Fitzgerald, Oiliver Bond, Henry Jackson, William Sampson, and Arthur O'Connor who held an umbrella over the prisoner's head.
There was a report of Finnerty in 1803 travelling to Dublin to help Robert Emmet in his preparations for a renewed insurrection,[4] and even an account of him commanding men on the streets during the aborted rising of July 23rd.
Alongside William Cobbett, he supported Richard Brinsley Sheridan, the Irish playwright, satirist, and poet, who won the Westminster seat in 1807, and in 1811 the abolitionist and proponent of minimum wages, Samuel Whitbread MP for Bedford.
[7] In the 1790s these had federated in the London Corresponding Society and been drawn into insurrectionary conspiracies by the United Irish emissaries James Coigly and William Putnam McCabe.
[8] His associates included the radical followers of Thomas Spence,[1] (advocate of the common and democratic ownership of land), who were eager to recruit among London Irish communities that had provided the most dependable elements in Coigly's United Britons and in the Despard Plot.
In An Address to the Irish People, which he to personally distribute around Dublin on a visit to the city early in 1812,[15][16] Percy Bysshe Shelley hailed Finnerty as a man "imprisoned for persisting in the truth.