Rebels and Informers: Stirrings of Irish Independence

The year 1998 is the bicentennial of the bloody end of the first great revolutionary republican movement in Ireland, and so this is a good time to look again closely at that movement's heroes and villains, and at the similarities and differences between the situations then and now. Strange to say, the Society of United Irishmen was founded in Belfast, and its first members were for the most part highly educated men of Protestant and Presbyterian stock. Imbued with the hopes and learning of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, their dream was to bury the religious divisions of the island, end the rule of the 'antiquated and corrupt Ascendancy' centred on Dublin Castle, and sever all connections with England. From the first, the Society was riddled with informers, and the government played cat-and-mouse. Most of the Society's leaders were scattered or banished, and endured picaresque sojourns in France and America. Wolfe Tone, its proto-martyr, his panache and gaiety undimmed, conspired in Paris during the early Napoleonic Wars in the hope that Ireland's independence might be won with the help of a French invasion. The quixotic Hamilton Rowan, disenchanted by Robespierre and the Terror, comforted his exile by boating (with his dog) in the marshes of the River Delaware. Drennan, pious coiner of the phrase 'Emerald Isle', retreated into patriotic poetry after a near-fatal trial for sedition. Of the book's four principal rebels, Lord Edward Fitzgerald gave the movement, as it headed towards the doomed rebellion of 1798, flourishes of romantic but hopelessly inadequate leadership. Oliver Knox draws freely on the journals and letters of the four principal rebels, and their voices reach uswith freshness and immediacy.