The beauty of Wolfe Tone's attempt to substitute the common name of Irishman for Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter was that it postulated a common national identity around which the three main faith communities might unite and which would enable government to function, while leaving room for a pluralist, rather than an essentialist model of cultural and religious identity. Furthermore, Ian McBride argues that United Irish political thought is ‘better described as Enlightenment republicanism than Romantic separatism’. He explains that ‘it was not an assertion of self-determination grounded upon ethnic or cultural difference, but an assault on ancien regime pillars of monarchy, aristocracy and church in the name of a non-sectarian republic’. Repeatedly in James Orr's work we observe him adhering to such principles, denouncing intoleranceand deploring sectarianism.

Supporters of United Irish strategy during the 1790s in Belfast had readily embraced cultural pluralism and employed it as a weapon against the metropolitan- centred outlook of the establishment. Irish cultural traditions in music, poetry and language were enthusiastically adopted and studied in order to underline the Irishmen's sense of difference, but the Presbyterian Dissenters had a further weapon in their cultural armoury, in the shape of their Scots heritage, with which to challenge the Ascendancy. Their ‘cultural declaration of independence’ was expressed in their renewed enthusiasm for the Ulster vernacular verse tradition, for which the popularity of Burns in contemporary Scotland supplied further endorsement.