Theobald Wolfe Tone, eldest son of Peter and Margaret Tone, was born in Dublin on 20 June 1763 (possibly in Liffey Street or Stafford Street) and baptized in the nearby Church of Ireland parish church of St. Mary's. Ireland was then a dependency of England, governed by an English Lord Lieutenant and legislated for by the Westminster Parliament. But although Ireland's connection with the mother country was similar to that of America, until the legislative union with Britain in 1801, it was complicated by the existence of an Irish Parliament. Throughout the eighteenth century the Irish Parliament claimed considerable autonomy. It finally won legislative independence from England in 1782, though retaining the connection through the crown and executive.

Political power in eighteenth-century Ireland was held by a tiny group of landed Protestants, most of them descendants of those who had acquired land confiscated from Catholics in the seventeenth century. The Catholic populace, though comprising two-thirds of the population, was excluded from political rights and theoretically from landownership. The Dissenters too were excluded from corporations until 1780, and though not legally debarred from Parliament, only a handful of Dissenting MPs was ever returned. Protestant insecurities about their position among a dominant and potentially aggrieved Catholic populace applied a brake on their distrust of England. But it was a resentful dependence, and although the 1760s witnessed the beginnings of agrarian troubles, the quiescence of the Catholic populace helped create a novel confidence among the ruling class. Coupled with the explosion of the printed word from mid-century, it produced several decades of debate about Ireland's constitutional position and provided the backdrop to Tone's early years.

The world of Irish politics was small, highly personalised and centred within a few minutes’ walking distance from the Tones’ home in Dublin. The city was the centre of the country's government, politics, trade, military, professional and educational life. There was a sense of living at the hub of things, which was shared by a complete cross-section of society, and mob interference in municipal and national politics was common.