"Who fears to speak of ninety-eight"?

On this day, 10th October 1791, 200 years ago, two men boarded the coach in Dublin at 10.30 am. Few could have imagined the carnage which would result from their trip to Belfast. The two men were Theobald Wolfe Tone and Thomas Russell. Wolfe Tone is the most famous name in Irish history. He was the son of a Protestant coach builder in Dublin and his ambition was to join the army. His father oDoosed this and insisted that he entered Trinity Collece. Dublin. to train as a lawyer. Later he eloped with Matilda Withering of Grafton Street, and went to the Middle Temple in London for two years to become a barrister. When he returned to Ireland he joined the Leinster Circuit but he did not really like the law and was a failure as a barrister. He was more interested in politics and became involved with the Whig Club in Dublin which had been started by Lord Charlemont who was also the commander of the Volunteers. Tone started to write political pamphlets and as a result he was appointed secretary to the Catholic Committee which was then campaigning for catholic emancipation. Tone wrote a pamphlet entitled An Argument on Behalf of the Catholics of Ireland in the summer of 1791, which brought him to the attention of the radical section of political thought in general and of the Volunteers of Belfast in particular. This was a group, all protestant at first, which had been reactivated to protect the island from invasion by the French, but which had become much more active in promoting catholic emancipation, free trade and freedom of the Irish parliament from its English counterpart. Some of the Volunteer leaders invited Tone to come to Belfast to discuss the setting up of a radical group there. (Fig 1).