December 21st, 1796: A French invasion fleet, carrying 15,000 battle-hardened veterans under Gen Lazare Hoche, enters Bantry Bay, Cork, after six days sailing from Brest. Immediate disembarkation is hindered by the partial dispersion of the fleet and extreme weather conditions, much to the frustration of Wolfe Tone on board the Indomptable.

On December 23rd, Tone enters in his diary: "I am now so near the shore than I can in a manner touch the sides of Bantry Bay with my right and left hand: yet God knows whether I shall ever tread again on Irish ground."

Loyalists are unnerved and Faulkner's Dublin Journal attempts to shore up their resolve by reporting on December 27th that the Inverness, Rothsay and Caithness fencibles and the Kildare, Clare, Donegal, Wexford and Limerick City militia received orders to march from Lehaunstown camp, near Bray, to Bantry with "the loudest acclamations of joy".

The fencibles, some of the 9,000 mainly Scottish militiamen permitted to serve in Ireland, are second-rate troops, as are the equally untested Irish militia and their yeomanry auxiliaries. Such are the manpower demands of the French war that there are only 5,000 regular infantry and cavalry available in Ireland and less than 10,000 soldiers of any description ready to converge on Bantry.

Fortunately for the government, violent storms and French fears of being trapped in Bantry Bay by the royal navy obliges the battered remnants of the fleet to abandon their mission on December 29th.

The reprieved administration is now determined to get to grips with the United Irish menace before the French return, particularly in the north where the 8,500 sworn republicans present in Cos Antrim, Down, Tyrone and Armagh in August have mushroomed into ten times that number.

A revamped Insurrection Act of 1797 permits the suspension of habeas corpus and the imposition of curfews in districts where martial law has been declared. Suspected United Irishmen and those found out of doors "in the unseasonable hours of the night" can be summarily transported to the fleet or conscripted into the army for service overseas; administering an illegal oath is a capital offence and receiving one punishable by transportation for life.

Lieut Gen Gerard Lake receives orders on March 3th, 1797, from Chief Secretary Thomas Pelham to "take the most immediate and decisive measures . . . for immediately disarming all persons who shall not bear his Majesty's Commission".

The spring of 1797 witnesses the "dragooning of Ulster" in which military "flying camps" descend on suspected communities in Cos Antrim, Down, Derry and Tyrone to terrorise the inhabitants into surrendering their arms. Many soldiers and militiamen are appalled by the casual brutality, house burning and murder which attends the dragooning.

Hundreds are committed to prison tenders on Lough Foyle and in Belfast Lough; hundreds more are detained to answer charges of sedition at the quarterly assizes. Scores of disaffected militiamen are shot in the various camps to discourage United Irish infiltration.

The United Irishmen compensate for these setbacks by building a mass-based organisation in Leinster and much of Munster. Two baronies in Co Meath are consequently placed under martial law on May 6th, 1797, as are parts of Co Kildare and King's County (Offaly) on May 12th, and Co Westmeath on May 25th. Their growing militancy is evidenced by raids on loyalist households for firearms and the killing of suspected informers.

A Cork paper, the Hibernian Chronicle, reports how, at 3 a.m. on August 9th, 1797, the inhabitants of Blessington, Co Wicklow, are "greatly alarmed by the sudden appearance of a vast number of people . . . in search of a man who had given information of several United Irishmen". The terrified yeoman guarding William McCormick surrender him to the mob whereupon he is killed "in a most savage and cruel manner . . . after which they disfigured the body in a way truly shocking".

The Privy Council discusses the incident and on August 12th, Faulkner's Dublin Jour- nal castigates its liberal rivals at the Dublin Evening Post, Hi- bernian Journal and Saunders's Newsletter for "attempting to palliate if not apologise for the authors of this bloody act on the pretence of the victim of their cruelty having given information against several traitors".

The republican perspective is given by Arthur O'Connor's Press which replaces the vandalised Northern Star. On September 30th, 1797, it asserts that "it is common to see the roads crowded with industrious persons, torn from the plough and the loom, hand cuffed together, on their march to the sea coast for transportation without the smallest formality, much less trial. On no other ground than suspicion, numbers have been shot to death."

1798 Diary, a weekly account of the week-by-week, month- by-month developments of the rebellion throughout the country, as well as its major and minor events and charac- ters, will appear each Saturday and begins tomorrow