included W. B. Yeats, Maud Gonne, Rose Kavanagh, Rosa Mulholland, George Sigerson, and Katharine Tynan. He also functioned as an elder statesman of the separatist movement, being active in the Young Ireland Society, and acted as president of the Irish Transvaal Committee, which supported the Boer side in the Boer War. Political outlook O'Leary was a separatist, believing in complete Irish independence from Britain. However, he was not a republican but a constitutional monarchist. He believed in physical force, but was opposed to individual acts of violence such as those promoted by O'Donovan Rossa with his Skirmishing Fund, believing that revolutionary action should be thoroughly prepared. He was strongly opposed to the land agitation promoted by Michael Davitt and Parnell. For most of his life, he was opposed to any form of parliamentary action, being particularly hostile to the former Fenian M.P. John O'Connor Power. However, he supported Parnell during the early days of the Split of 1890–91. He was a secularist, believing that the Church should stay out of politics. In an article published in the Dublin University Review in 1886, he showed some awareness that Protestants would require guarantees of their liberties within an independent Ireland. Like most intellectuals of his generation, he was not interested in the Irish language, although sympathetic to organisations of the Gaelic revival of the 1880s onwards. Personal life O'Leary never married, although he had an early love affair with a young woman, who is thought to have later entered a convent. He acted as best man for James Stephens, in 1864. He was brought up Catholic, but abandoned the religion for all of his life, until close to his death, when he was reconciled to the church, around Christmas 1906. He inherited property from his family in the town of Tipperary. For most of his life, this provided a reasonably comfortable income, so that he did not have to earn money and was able to assist fellow separatists financially. However, he did become a victim of agitation during the Plan of Campaign in 1889–91, when rental payments to him largely ceased. He was remembered in the town of Tipperary as a 'hard landlord'. Yeats' Tribute In his poem, September 1913, the poet W.B.Yeats laments the death of O'Leary with the line: "Romantic Ireland's dead and gone; it's with O'Leary in the grave" He also mentions O'Leary in his poem "Beautiful Lofty Things":