In this "Back Lane Parliament" he joined Committee chairman, John Keogh, and secretary, Wolfe Tone, in pressing for full and immediate Catholic Emancipation.

He took the society's test or oath to advance, in the cause of a national and representative government for Ireland, a union of Catholic and Protestant, from Fitzgerald's friend and protector, Mary Moore.

With Oliver Bond, Richard McCormick (McCormack) and Bernard MacSheehy (Tone's aide-de-camp), he conspired to solicit French assistance for a republican insurrection.

Its publication, according to MacNeven, was necessitated by "abusive misrepresentation" by "hirelings" of the British crown, and by prominent Federalists such as Rufus King, the former minister to Great Britain.

Against the charge that United Irish had been agents of republican France, and that in the United States, he and his fellow exiles should be regarded as subversives, MacNeven argued that soliciting French assistance Irish patriots had made the same pragmatic calculation as had the Continental Congress in courting Louis XVI--and indeed the same calculation as had English patriots when in 1688 they invited the armed intervention of William of Orange.

[6] While he had been critical of Daniel O'Connell, the completion of Catholic Emancipation in 1829, and subsequent reforms, persuaded MacNeven that there was no longer a role in Ireland for physical-force republicanism.

"We must all prefer to the most successful use of physical violence", he declared in his last public address, "the moral, peaceful revolution which O'Connell is now effecting by the masterly employment of his powers acquired to his country since 1798".

In his presidential address, he told the banqueting members that they had convened for the same purpose that assembled "good men of all nations and creeds" to give "their voices against the enslavement of the Africans".

Some of his purely literary works, his "Rambles through Switzerland" (Dublin, 1803), his Pieces of Irish History (New York, 1807), and his numerous political tracts attracted wide attention.