from France attractive to the majority of the population.
             The polarization of society and political thought was one of the first major influences the French Revolution had on Ireland, as Smyth points out:
             "In a little time the French revolution became the test of every man's political creed and the nation was fairly divided into two great parties, the aristocrats and the democrats". Smyth
             Public debate was stimulated as the French experience created an example for radical minds in Ireland, of how to establish a political system based on the 'Rights of Man', as the mightiest ancien regime in Europe had fallen to the power of reformist political action. The Burke- Paine debate caught the imagination of the Irish public, and forever changed the politics of the country. The mass circulation of Paine's Rights of Man by the 'Whigs of the Capital', printing twenty thousand cheap copies, allowed the revolutionary mood to spread throughout the country, as the people were receptive of his description of the time, as 'an age of revolutions'. The ideas of Paine were influential in the establishment of the United Irish Society, as Paine was elected an honorary member of the Dublin Society, and many of his ideas about the aristocracy were adopted by the Society. The Catholic and Presbyterian communities were obviously the most accepting of such principles, as they swept away a range of archaic, unjust privileges, the disestablishment of the church and the abolition of tithes also heightening such support.
             The Presbyterians, a group mostly concentrated in Ulster welcomed the French Revolution, as concepts of 'liberty, equality and fraternity' were in keeping with their habitual democratic instincts and their belief in the principles of the Enlightenment. Such factors made Presbyterians receptive to the French principles, and their participation in Volunteering and the gaining ...