Young Ireland was a political and cultural movement in the 1840s committed to an all-Ireland struggle for independence and democratic reform. Grouped around the Dublin weekly The Nation, it took issue with the compromises and clericalism of the larger national movement, Daniel O'Connell's Repeal Association, from which it seceded in 1847. Despairing, in the face of the Great Famine, of any other course, in 1848 Young Irelanders attempted an insurrection. Following the arrest and the exile of most of their leading figures, the movement split between those who carried the commitment to "physical force" forward into the Irish Republican Brotherhood, and those who sought to build a "League of North and South" linking an independent Irish parliamentary party to tenant agitation for land reform.

Robert Emmet was an Irish Republican, orator and rebel leader. Following the suppression of the United Irish uprising in 1798, he sought to organise a renewed attempt to overthrow the British Crown and Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland, and to establish a nationally representative government. Emmet entertained, but ultimately abandoned, hopes of immediate French assistance and of coordination with radical militants in Great Britain. In Ireland, many of the surviving veterans of '98 hesitated to lend their support, and his rising in Dublin in 1803 proved abortive.