approved and signed by the delegates, was presented to the bishops as a fait accompli, with no implication that their sanction was sought or obtained. In January 1793, Keogh led a delegation (which included Tone) that carried the petition, which called for full emancipation, to London. The government, eager to secure a measure of Catholic loyalty in advance of the war with the new French Republic, accorded them an audience with the King, and in April helped force a Catholic Relief Act through the Dublin Parliament. The Act relieved Catholics of most of their remaining Penal Law disabilities, lifting the bar to legal appointments and to army commissions, and admitting them on the same limited and idiosyncratic terms as Protestants to the parliamentary franchise. The necessary oaths, however, continued to bar them from Parliament itself. In return, Keogh promised that Catholics would not press for further separation from England and that their Committee would disband--concessions for which Keogh was sharply criticised. In 1795, Keogh briefly reconvened the Committee in response to the declaration of the new Lord Lieutenant, Earl Fitzwilliam in favour full emancipation. When Fitzwilliam was recalled after just 100 days, Keogh led another delegation to London where it received scant regard. Keogh's authority and influence in the Catholic movement in Ireland decreased as newer leaders emerged, though he remained (at least formally) on the Dublin committee of the United Irishmen into 1798. Although he was frequently arrested and searched, Keogh was a moderate radical, and he used his wealth to aid his co-religionists' cause without crossing the line to overt illegality. He was on the non-violent wing of the United Irishmen, along with Thomas Addis Emmet. Days before the outbreak of the 1798 Rebellion, in despair at the likely result, Keogh printed a pamphlet warning his followers in Dublin that it could not succeed. Some republicans, such as Walter Cox (who acted as a body guard to Lord Edward Fitzgerald) were sceptical of Keogh's motives. Cox suggested that Keogh might have colluded with the government to frustrate the preparations for an insurrection. The acknowledged government informer Samuel Turner (himself a Convention delegate from Newry) suggests, however, that Keogh would have been an unlikely source of information for Dublin Castle. Turner reported that while Keogh was formally counted among 22 members of the "National Committee" of the United Irishmen meeting in Dublin in the summer of 1797, like his