Wolfe Tone and the Hibernian Catch Club: Sociability in Revolutionary Ireland

Theobald Wolfe Tone, Irish political radical, best-known of the leaders of the United Irish rebellion of 1798, was a cultural polymath. And this is perhaps something that amidst the memorialising and commemorating that goes on in Irish republicanism could be a little better understood. He was an aspiring novelist; exceptionally accomplished in the genre of diarist and master of the epistolary craft; and even had an early dalliance with amateur theatricals.

Less well-known, however, was that he was an accomplished singer and in 1790 he joined the Dublin musical society, the Hibernian Catch Club. His diary shows that after a financial windfall he paid for his membership to the club, but beyond this we are very much in the dark. This lecture will explore his arrival in the club, his network of friends and acquaintances who nominated and supported him, and the tensions that operated in this particular brand of club-life in 1790s Dublin.

Political divisions were to be expected, but tense stand-offs also occurred between those who valued a commitment to music-making over sociability. It will be clear that we can say much more about Tone’s cultural and artistic impulses through a study of Dublin club-life in one of the most fractured periods of Ireland’s history.