On the day Russell set off for Ulster, Saturday, 18 January 1794, he and Tone walked the length of the Phoenix Park in Dublin. Tone spoke of his growing disillusionment with politics. His long association with the Catholics opened up a new line of legal patronage, and a commission as junior defence counsel in the key case against three leading Drogheda Catholics augured well for his otherwise unenthusiastic return to his profession. Within three months, however, his fate had been decided by other events and he was launched into that career as revolutionary republican for which he is best known.

I

Though now living in Dublin, Tone continued to shun the United Irish Society, which, as its rump membership readily admitted, was only rescued ‘from that state of insignificance into which it had lately fallen’ by a parliamentary attack on its reform plan. The plan was distributed as a broadsheet which also carried an address to ‘the poorer classes of the community’. But like the accompanying account of the Society's proceedings, it seemed something of a swansong. Rumours circulated of spies within the organisation, and its imminent suppression. Collins hinted to his employers that rich pickings could be had from the seizure of the Society's books, still left openly on its table each Friday. The government crack-down finally occurred on Friday, 23 May, after the arrest of a French agent implicated the Society in treason.

On Thursday, 3 April, two men arrived from England and took rooms at Hyde's Coffee House in Dame Street. It was bitterly cold for the time of year. Snow still covered the mountains and the men complained of the discomfort of Irish lodgings by comparison with those they had left behind in England. One of the travellers, the Revd William Jackson, though Irish, had spent most of his life in England and had few acquaintances in Ireland.