Wolfe Tone

Theobald Wolfe Tone, posthumously known as Wolfe Tone (Irish: Bhulbh Teón; 20 June 1763 – 19 November 1798), was a revolutionary exponent of Irish independence and is an iconic figure in Irish republicanism. Convinced that, so long as his fellow Protestants feared to make common cause with the Catholic majority, the British Crown would continue to govern Ireland in the English interest, in 1791 he helped form the Society of United Irishmen.

Fuelled by the popular grievances of rents, tithes and taxes, driven by martial-law repression, and despairing of reform, the society developed as an insurrectionary movement. When, in the early summer of 1798, it broke into open rebellion, Tone was in exile soliciting assistance from the French Republic. In October 1798, on his second attempt to land in Ireland with French troops and supplies, he was taken prisoner. Sentenced to be hanged, he died from a reportedly self-inflicted wound.

Since the mid-nineteenth century, his name has been invoked, and his legacy disputed, by different factions of Irish republicanism. These have held annual, but separate, commemorations at his graveside in Bodenstown, County Kildare.