The rebellion lacked overall co-ordination and, as a result, varied enormously in character from area to area. The arrest of most of the United Irish leadership in Leinster in March 1798 and the arrest on 19 May of Lord Edward Fitzgerald, one of the few United Irish leaders with a military background, shaped the nature of the rebellion in south Leinster when it erupted on 23 May. It was disorganised, incoherent and sectarian.

The two Father Murphys were prominent figures in the rising in south Leinster. The paraphernalia of Roman Catholicism was more in evidence than the symbolism of the United Irishmen. Protestants would appear to have been murdered because they were Protestants rather than on account of their politics. Roman Catholic loyalists - and such people did exist - were often left unharmed and unmolested.

Although revisionists would have it otherwise, it is exceedingly difficult to view the rebellion in south Leinster as being other than largely sectarian rather than political in character with theological fanaticism playing a significant part.

The massacre of between one hundred and two hundred Protestants (and some Roman Catholic servants) in a barn at Scullabogue, Co. Wexford, cannot easily be conjured away. This appalling incident has coloured Protestant and Presbyterian perceptions of 1798 down to the present day. It almost certainly occupies a place of greater prominence in Ulster Protestant and Presbyterian consciousness than the Battle of Antrim of 7 June or the Battle of Ballynahinch on 12 and 13 June.

The rebellion in Antrim and Down had none of the hallmarks of a jihad. The rising in Ulster was as uncoordinated as south Leinster and for similar reasons. On 5^th June the Revd Dr William Dickson, almost certainly the United Irish leader in Down, was arrested by the authorities. Four days previously Robert Simms, who had been the first secretary of the Belfast Society of United Irishmen, resigned as adjutant general of Antrim because he refused to rise before the arrival of French help.

Henry Joy McCracken, a humane and gentle man who had been the founder of Belfast's first Sunday school, replaced Simms in Antrim. Dickson was replaced by Henry Monro, a Lisburn linen draper and a direct descendant of Daniel Monro who in turn was a cousin of Robert Monro, the commander of the Scottish army in Ulster in the 1640s.

The rising in Antrim had been defeated before the United Irishmen of Down swung into action. In both Antrim and Down Presbyterian tenant farmers and agricultural labourers put on their Sunday best and made their protest in arms against the venal and corrupt parliament in Dublin.

In both counties the Presbyterians largely stood alone. There was very little Roman Catholic support for the rising. Ironically, Roman Catholics serving in the militia and Protestants serving in the yeomanry largely suppressed the rebellion in Ulster. Thus the United Irish ideal was most closely realised in the forces of the Crown.

The rising in Connaught was prompted by the arrival of General Humbert's French force at Killala Bay on 22^nd August. The United Irishmen were weak in Connaught and the local peasantry rallied to support Humbert in the mistaken belief that he was a crusader on behalf of the Pope and ‘"the Blessed Virgin". After a short but rather impressive campaign Humbert surrendered at Ballinamuck, Co. Longford, on 8 September. Protestants were few in Connaught and Humbert imposed strict discipline on his followers, so although the trappings of sectarianism were in evidence, there were no sectarian massacres.

The final act of the 1798 rebellion was played out in October when Wolfe Tone arrived with a French squadron that was defeated off the coast of Donegal.

The rebellion of 1798 was radically different in character from what was envisaged and desired by the United Irishmen. The Society of United Irishmen was a largely middle-class movement, largely Protestant (and mainly Presbyterian in Ulster) and anti-clerical in tone. Yet, the course of events was heavily influenced by the sectarian passions of the Roman Catholic peasantry of south Leinster under priestly control.

The most important consequence of 1798 was the Act of Union. The Union abolished the quasi-independent medieval Irish parliament. As the United Irishmen had originally sought the reform of this Parliament, many United Irishmen were not unhappy at its abolition, especially as it held out the prospect of reform, Catholic emancipation and the liberalisation of trade. By depriving so many boroughs of their parliamentary representation, the Act of Union was, in effect, a significant measure of parliamentary reform. Trade was liberalised. The only failing was that Catholic emancipation was delayed for a generation.

In many respects not a great deal separated the aspirations of the United Irishmen on one hand and those of Pitt and Castlereagh, the principal architects of the Union, on the other. Therefore, one should not be unduly surprised by the fact that Samuel Neilson and Archibald Rowan Hamilton warmly welcomed the union. They were not alone.

Almost exactly a century after the founding of the United Irishmen in Belfast Dr William Drennan's son, John Swanwick Drennan, attended the Ulster Unionist Convention of 1892 and, a poet, like his father, wrote verses to celebrate Ulster Unionist resistance to Home Rule prior to the election of July 1892 and the formation of Gladstone's fourth administration.

Dr J S Drennan's sister Sarah married a John Andrews of Comber. Among their descendants were Thomas Andrews and J. M. Andrews. The former was an active Liberal Unionist, being president of both the Ulster Reform Club and the Ulster Liberal Unionist Association. He also delivered one of the best speeches at the Ulster Unionist Convention of 1892. The latter, Thomas Andrews' son, was Northern Ireland's second Prime Minister.

Dr J. S. Drennan's daughter Ruth married Adam Duffin, another leading Liberal Unionist. Ruth was responsible for the preservation of the Drennan letters, the correspondence of her grandfather and an invaluable source for the study of Belfast radical politics in the 1790s.

Adam Duffin's own papers are a source for the study of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Ulster Unionism. His son, C. E. Duffin, was to serve as a "B" Special. It must be emphasised that it was not only Dr William Drennan's descendants who were strong and committed Unionists. Drennan's descendants are a paradigm for the wider Presbyterian community. Alexander Crawford, the great grandfather of Fred Crawford, the Lame gunrunner, was a close friend ofHenry Joy McCracken and shared his political outlook.

Many solidly Unionist families in Antrim and Down remain proud to boast of ancestors "oot" in 1798, although to Unionists in Fermanagh and Tyrone this is often incomprehensible.

In 1888, J. J. Shaw, a Presbyterian barrister, future Recorder of Belfast and a former academic at Magee College in Londonderry, in a publication entitled Mr. Gladstone’s Two Irish Policies attempted to explain the conundrum which perplexed not only W. E. H. Lecky but William Gladstone and Irish nationalists then and now:

Catholic emancipation, a reformed parliament, a responsible executive, and equal laws for the whole Irish people – these were the declared and rear objects of the United Irishmen. And it was only because they saw no hope of attaining these objects through an Irish parliament that they took up arms...

These benefits, Shaw explained, everyone enjoyed as citizens of the United Kingdom as the result of the Act of Union. However, Shaw feared that might not be so under a Home Rule parliament dominated by one faction of the Irish people.

Presbyterians and Roman Catholics alike had been excluded from political power and influence by the Protestant (i.e. Church of Ireland) Ascendancy in the old Irish parliament that had existed prior to 1800. Shaw, as a good Ulster Presbyterian, could not view with equanimity the prospect of a return to ascendancy government, which is what Presbyterians believed Home Rule would herald. Presbyterians feared renewed exclusion from power and influence, this time at the hands of a Roman Catholic ascendancy.