Their hero was his critic, Tom Paine.

Yet Froude says that when Burke "took up the Irish cause at last in earnest, it was with a brain which the French Revolution had deranged, and his interference became infinitely mischievous."* As a matter of fact, his interference after 1789 had no result at all.

So far as the French Revolution modified his ideas, it made them more Conservative than ever, and his object in preaching the conciliation of Catholics was to deter them from Revolutionary methods.
-- * English in Ireland, ii.

214, 215.
-- But Burke, like Grattan, was an Irishman, and therefore not to be trusted.

If he had been an Englishman, or if he had gloried in the name of Protestant, Froude's eyes would have been opened, and he would have seen Burke's incomparable superiority to Lord Clare as a just interpreter of events.