The journey north had been gruelling, involving much late-night travel on horseback along dreadful roads. Tone was tired and so the summer was to continue. The reason was the new plan to re-form the Catholic Committee on a truly representative basis, with delegates elected by primary assemblies from every county and town. It was a plan so revolutionary in scope that even United Irish critics of the Catholics looked on with awed admiration. The outcome was the celebrated Catholic Convention of December 1792. Its delegates were effectively elected by universal manhood (if indirect) Catholic suffrage, and the extensive paperwork and correspondence involved were largely handled by Tone. Catholic anger at their treatment in the recent parliamentary session produced an uncharacteristic, almost militant confidence which the establishment found unnerving. The elections and propaganda of the summer and autumn months of 1792 spread that new militancy into the countryside and to social levels not normally conversant with politics. It was the consequent erosion of deference and feared breakdown of traditional modes of social control over a Catholic populace long deemed inferior which produced the ensuing Protestant backlash.

I

Instructions for the election of delegates were circulated that summer and became the object of a concerted attack by the grand juries and the landlord interests they represented. The Catholic Committee, in seeking a popular mandate to convene nationally, was bypassing the source of Protestant authority in the Dublin Parliament. The projected Convention was denounced as a ‘Popish congress’, modelled on the French Revolutionary example and threatening to ‘overawe’ the ‘Protestant Parliament’. The assumed disloyalty, slavishness and general inferiority of the Catholics were again put forward to justify the maintenance of Protestant ascendancy.

But once again it was the loss of control, implied in the Catholics’ defiant shift from traditionally submissive tactics, which produced most stridency. The Freeman's Journal contrasted ‘the too forward interference of a few traders’ to Kenmare's moderation. It accused the Catholic Committee of ingratitude in not thanking Parliament for the recent concessions, and warned that ‘to contend for equality is to endeavour for the overthrow of subordination’. The Fermanagh grand jury urged ‘submissive gratitude’ on the Catholics as the only way ‘to merit the extension of future favours’.