The 1798 Rebellion unleashed a paper war involving contemporary historians and pro-Establishment literary reviews.The debate re-ignited whenever Irish issues impacted on Westminster politics - as happened frequently throughout the nineteenth century. Irish Rebellion: Protestant Polemic, 1798-1900 traces this paper-warfare against the background of the Union, Catholic Emancipation, Young Ireland, Gladstone and the Fenians, Victoria's jubilees, the 1898 centenary and the South African War. In doing so, the book's focus is less on the events themselves and more on the rhetoric that coloured perceptions of those events.

Apologists for the Protestant Ascendancy represented the 1798 Rebellion as a continuation of the long-running conflict between Catholic and Protestant, and as part of the alleged Europe-wide Jacobin conspiracy, at which London's antijacobin press directed so much fire-power. An introductory chapter surveys the work of modern scholars, providing a yardstick against which to measure the more extreme examples of Ascendancy myth-making.