Robert Shipboy MacAdam who, with Dr. James MacDonnell, had presided over a precursor of the League earlier in the century: Cuideacht Gaoidhilge Uladh / The Ulster Gaelic Society (1828-1843). The new Belfast branch was formed under the active patronage (until he left to become Church of Ireland Lord Bishop of Ossory) of the Rev. John Baptiste Crozier and the presidency of his parishioner, Dr. John St Clair Boyd, both unionists, and of the Orange Order Grand Master, the Rev. Richard Tutledge Kane. For other Protestant pioneers of the Irish language in the north the League was a non-sectarian door into the nationalist community with whom their political sympathies lay. This was the case for Alice Milligan, publisher in Belfast of The Shan Van Vocht. Milligan's command of Irish was never fluent, and on that basis Patrick Pearse was to object when, in 1904, the Gaelic League hired her as a travelling lecturer. She proved herself by establishing new branches throughout Ireland and raising funds along the way. In the north, in Ulster, she focused on the more difficult task of recruiting Protestants, working with, among other activists, Hyde, Ada McNeill, Roger Casement, Alice Stopford Green, Stephen Gwynn, and Seamus McManus. James Owen Hannay (better known as the novelist George A. Birmingham), originally of Belfast, was co-opted onto the League's national executive body in December 1904 while a Church of Ireland (Anglican) rector in Westport in County Mayo. Hyde and Arthur Griffith sympathised with Hannay's desire for a "union of the two Irish democracies", Catholic in the south and Protestant in the north. In the north Hannay saw a potential ally in Lindsay Crawford and his Independent Orange Order. Like the Conradh na Gaeilge, he saw the IOO as "profoundly democratic in spirit" and independent of "the rich and the patronage of the great". Crawford, who stood for election to the League's executive committee, was critical of what he regarded as the League's impractical romanticism. In his paper, Irish Protestant, he suggested that the Irish Ireland movement needed an injection of "Ulsteria", an "industrial awakening on true economic lines: it is wrong when people crave bread to offer them 'language and culture'". Offence taken at his successful play General John Regan, and his defence of Crawford's opposition to church control of education, strained Hannay's relations with nationalists and he withdrew from League. Meanwhile, in North America, Crawford (who had found no