It was developments in England which revived the Catholic campaign in 1790. The English Catholics had renewed their petitions for relief in 1788. The outcome was Mitford's bill of 1791, opening up the professions to English Catholics and removing many of their remaining disabilities. The petitions and debates were reported in the Irish press, recognition of ‘the enlightened philosophy of the present age’ highlighting the outmoded nature of the Irish penal laws. The Irish Catholics were as loyal as any other subjects, proclaimed the Freeman's Journal. They might hold the same religion as the Pope, but they were hardly ‘papist’; ‘they laugh at his temporal authority and have no opinions repugnant to a free constitution’. Yet the paper spoke for the majority of liberal Protestants in seeing emancipation as a gradual process and recommending a total repeal of the penal laws only after Catholic loyalty had been established through ‘long experience of … rectitude of conduct … temperance, moderation, and a studious disregard of political strifes’. The Irish government likewise warned Pitt of the repercussions in Ireland of concessions to the English Catholics, and those on offer in Mitford's bill were scaled down accordingly.

However, the urban middle-class Catholics in Ireland – particularly those on the Catholic Committee – were growing restive. Notable among them was John Keogh, a wealthy Dublin silk merchant. Employment in trade was despised in eighteenth-century Europe generally, and the penal laws contained only minor restrictions. Some Catholics made great fortunes. Keogh was one of them. He had worked his way up from apprenticeship to retire a rich man in 1787. By then he had also acquired extensive landed interests in Sligo, Leitrim, Roscommon and Dublin, where his mansion at Mount Jerome was to become a centre for Catholic mobilisation in the early 1790s and a favourite haunt of Tone's. Keogh was a blunt, no-nonsense man of fifty-two when Tone first began working with him in 1792. His abilities, and his antagonism to the aristocratic domination of the Committee, had brought him to government attention as early as 1784, when a clumsy and unsuccessful attempt to dissuade him from co-operation with the Dissenters marked him out as leader of the democratic party within the Committee.