Derry launch of ‘Wolfe Tone: Irish Jacobin’ with author Kieran Allen
Kieran Allen’s new book on Wolfe Tone, the founder of Irish Republicanism Wolfe Tone: Irish Jacobin is the first major biography of the founder of Irish republicanism in over twenty years.
The publication takes a “distinctly novel interpretation” describing Tone as a ‘Jacobin’, a term used to describe radicals during the French Revolution.
Wolfe Tone: Irish Jacobin will be launched in St Columb’s Hall in Derry, on Thursday, November 17, 2026, at 7.30pm.
Author is Kieran Allen, an Emeritus Associate Professor of Sociology at University College Dublin.
Wolfe Tone is a unique figure within Irish nationalism, as an English-speaking Protestant of settler colonial origin, Tone underwent a dramatic political transformation in his relatively short life: from an elite playboy with colonial fantasies, into a radical Jacobin who advocated the unity of Catholics, Protestants, and Dissenters.
Inspired by the French Revolution, he helped to build the United Irishmen into one of the largest revolutionary movements in Europe. Their rebellion of 1798 was crushed only through systematic terror, with more people murdered in Ireland than all of France during the ‘Reign of Terror’.
This political biography dispels the myths surrounding Tone’s life and politics. It challenges both nationalist accounts which often depict him as ‘coming over’ to the Catholic side and revisionist accounts which suggest that the ‘cult of Tone’ led to republican violence.
Instead the book charts his political development as a revolutionary who, despite religious differences, placed trust in the ‘men of no property’ to break connections with England. His pioneering anti-sectarian vision remains as relevant as ever today.