In a still useful article about the impact of the American revolution on Ireland which was written two generations ago, Michael Kraus (1971) observed that the revolution and its effects ‘so faded into the more momentous French revolution that the general student often overlooked the particular influence of America’. If the American bicentennial prompted some further investigation of the subject in Ireland, the bicentenaries of the French revolution and the 1798 rising have more than restored the original imbalance and Kraus's observation is at least as true today as it was when first made in 1939. This study is an attempt to isolate the ‘particular influence’ of the American revolution. Its aim is to trace the influence of the revolution and the international war that it precipitated on the political consciousness of the various sections of Irish society during the period from the beginning of colonial unrest in the early 1760s until the end of hostilities in 1783.

I have not attempted to present a detailed narrative of events – a task performed in considerable detail for the latter part of the period in question by Maurice O'Connell (1965), and for the entire period in a less detailed manner by R.B. McDowell (1979). Instead, my concern has been to chart the evolution of attitudes in Ireland at each stage of the revolution and to identify changes that can reasonably be considered to have resulted from the revolutionary process – whether produced directly through the operation of American example on Irish opinion or indirectly as a result of altered circumstances arising from the war.