The United Irishmen and the Rebellion of 1798

Ireland during the 1790s was filled with uncertainty, much of which was caused by the dramatic interplay between the Society of United Irishmen and the Irish government. The Society’s stated goals of Catholic emancipa-tion and parliamentary reform were contrary to the conservative administra-tion’s aims, but the Society enjoyed much popular support and its numbers increased throughout the decade. United activities culminated in the ulti-mately futile 1798 rebellion, which would have been of little consequence were it not for the poor state of the Irish military at the time and the gov-ernment’s bungling of United affairs in general. The rebellion’s failure, then, cannot be blamed on governmental efforts to counter it, but rather is best explained by the United Irishmen’s poor planning of the affair and the lack of clear internal communication within the Society. To say that the United Irishmen planned the uprising poorly is not to say that there was a lack of planning; indeed, one might suggest that the Society’s leaders planned altogether too much and missed promising opportinuties to act. Prior to 1798, general unrest was noted in several regions, and many believed that the country would have fallen to the Irishmen had they acted sooner.1 The leadership’s planning was also misdirected; nearly all aspects of the rebellion relied on the timely aid of the French and too little time was spent preparing and training the Irish insurgents on the ground, who were largely left to find their own weaponry and to fend for themselves