From the early 1790s onwards, in Ireland as on the sister island, an ongoing print war raged between those who supported the political status quo and those who sought to replace it with one shaped by French revolutionary ideas. While French Enlightenment writings had been circulating widely among the elite and upwardly mobile of Irish towns since the early eighteenth century, cheap print was now pressed into service to determine whether an increasingly literate and politically aware population would stay with the values of the old order or move towards the new radical ideas. Competing pamphlets and newspapers battled it out, to be enforced by a veritable deluge of songbooks, broadsides and handbills proclaiming for and against the new ideas.

Pamphlet warfare was nothing new in the realms of political disputation in the two islands but now the London and Dublin publications were supplemented by an increasing number from Belfast – the hub of United Irish print production in the disturbed decade of the 1790s. Though one of Thomas Paine's works was published in Cork in 1797, the output of southern printers, insofar as it was political at all, seems to have been dominated by the conservative rather than the radical. In Cork both Edwards and Haly published a number of works that focused on ‘exterminating French principles’ (as one 1793 publication expressed it) and particularly challenging Paine's Age of Reason.