Our collection of articles, records and reviews about Thomas Paine and Ireland.
O’Connor, although he inherited an estate and was a member of the Irish Parliament, was an advocate for women’s rights, supported emancipation of Catholics although a Protestant, and independence from England. When he joined the United Irishmen fighting the British occupation of Ireland, he was arrested.
Thomas Paine called himself a citizen of the world and as if to sustain this claim was an active revolutionary in Britain, France and America. If any one of his contemporaries deserves the title more it is William Duane.
BOOK REVIEW: Transoceanic Radical: William Duane Read Post »
It is well known that Paine came close to losing the fight to establish democracy within the ruling circles in the American Colonies, because of the wish of John Adams, an American Federalist Congressman, who wanted to have a monarchy in the new United States of America. Paine would never have accepted this, because, to him, democracy was everything.
Royle attempts to answer the question why there was no revolution? He looks at the nature of the popular movements arguing that their leaders knew both their own limits and those of their followers. He further argues that the revolutionaries were always in the minority.
BOOK REVIEW: Revolutionary Britannia? Reflections On The Threat Of Revolution In Britain Read Post »
The influence of Paine’s political thought on the Irish rebels cannot be underestimated. In the Ireland of 1790 many minds were fixed upon the French Revolution. For Burke, Ireland was either a strong dike to keep Jacobinism out or a broken bank to let it in.
Paine’s Rights of Man was “the Koran” of Belfast, Theobald Wolfe Tone learned in October 1791 when he went north from Dublin to found the first Society of United Irishmen. Edmund Burke, an Irishman, lost the loyalty of his radical countrymen to Paine.
There can be no doubt that Paine’s ideas in the 1790’s had profound effects upon political thinking among Irish radicals, just as they did among the revolutionaries of France, the United States, and Britain. Both he and Wolfe Tone met in Paris in 1797 and during the “dragooning” of Ulster.
When Hamilton Rowan first effected his escape from an Irish prison and went to Paris, he met Thomas Paine in the street.
