This paper draws out the tension between the well-fed leadership of the 1798 rebellion versus reports of hungry reality for poorer rebels. Readers of the unabridged diaries of Theobald Wolfe Tone must be struck by how often the man talks about what he ate, when he ate it and who he ate it with. Emerging from the coffee houses and dining clubs of Dublin and Belfast, the prosperous members of the professional classes and minor gentry who made up the leadership of the United Irishmen spent a good d