The Hibernian Chronicle

This week the Irish Newspaper Archive celebrates some new titles to its pages, including the Hibernian Chronicle during the years 1783-1792. This was a particularly exciting period in Irish history, in the lead up to the 1798 rebellion when news of activities in America and France spread to Ireland.

The Hibernian Chronicle became the principal organ for the increasingly prosperous Catholic middle class.

Here the Chronicle reports on an address to the people of London from the Society of United Irishmen in Dublin printed in November 1792:

impressed with the resemblance in the title, nature and estimation of their respective institutions and acting on the fraternity of feeling which such a coincidence naturally inspires the title which you bear is a glorious one and we too are friends of the people. If we be afraid- ‘who are the people’? we turn not our eyes here and there to this party or persuasion and cry low the people but we look around us with partiality… and we answer the multitude of human beings, the living mass of humanity associated.. and to be happy. …. As friends of the people upholding their rights and deploring their sufferings the great object of this society is a real representation of the Irish nation in an Irish parliament and his friends of the whole people, we support the necessity of Catholic emancipation as a means of making representation what it ought to be free, equal, and entire….

Then under the leadership of Archibald Hamilton Rowan, James Napper Tandy, Oliver Bond, and others the United Irishmen in Dublin issued a number of addresses including the above. It can be read in full in the pages of the Hibernian Chronicle.