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Established Church liberals had come together to exchange views. At Dungannon the Ulster Volunteers had declared, "As Irishmen and as Protestants we rejoice in the lessening of penal enactments against our Catholic fellow-countrymen." The Volunteers might be regarded as the transition stage from which was to evolve the modern conception of the Irish Nation—a Republic independent of Britain.
The nucleus of the first Society of United Irishmen was the Secret Committee of the Green Corps of Belfast Volunteers. In co-operation with Wolfe Tone, the secret committee met on the 14th October, 1791, and founded the first Society of United Irishmen. Thirteen men were present at this epochal meeting,—Samuel Neilson, William McCleary, Henry Haslett, William Tennant, Thomas MacCabe, Samuel McTier, William Sinclair, Gilbert MacIlveen,—Campbell, Robert and William Simms, Thomas Russell and Theobald Wolfe Tone. They were all Presbyterians except Tone and Russell who belonged to the established Protestant Church. The eleven Presbyterians were the leading democrats in Ulster, and determined advocates of reform and Catholic emancipation. MacCabe had struck a blow for liberty and humanity some years earlier when, in 1786, he stopped the formation in Belfast of a company of merchants to take part in the Negro slave trade.
Belfast was, in 1791, ablaze with enthusiasm for the French Revolution, and according to Tone, Paine's book—"The Rights of Man"—was the Koran of the citizens. Tone named the United Irish organisation and outlined its general aims. While he and most of those present were convinced that a Republic must be the ultimate issue, their address voiced ideals of reform broad enough to secure immediate unity for a national advance. This first address of theirs makes inspiring reading:—
DECLARATION AND RESOLUTIONS OF THE SOCIETY OF UNITED IRISHMEN OF BELFAST.
In the present great era of reform, when unjust governments are falling in every quarter of Europe, when religious persecution is compelled to abjure her tyranny over conscience, when the rights of man are ascertained in theory and that theory substantiated by practice, when antiquity can no longer defend absurd and oppressive forms against the common sense and common interests of mankind, when all government is acknowledged to originate from the
