to an Irish mother, leads "his" people in the struggle for land rights and a restored Irish Parliament. Assuming of the defeat of the existing Irish Home Rule movement, and attempting too many reconciliations, it was not well received in the nationalist press. Commemorating 1798 In 1893 Milligan returned to Belfast. She lived with Anna Johnston (later to write under the name, Ethna Carbery), the daughter of Robert Johnston, a leading member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. Together with their next-door neighbour, the English-born suffragist Mary Ann Bulmer, they founded the Irish Women's Association (IWA) in Belfast both to spread "national ideas among the women" and to sustain the city's national and literary "prestige". Branches were also established in Moneyreagh (where the Presbyterian minister, Richard Lyttle, convened the Gaelic League), and in Portadown. In 1895 Milligan started writing a regular column for the Irish Weekly Independent entitled "Notes from the North" to remind a Dublin readership of these and other contributions of women, and of the North, to the national cause. Together with Johnston and Bulmer (and her son Bulmer Hobson, later also of the IRB), Milligan was drawn into the orbit of Francis Joseph Bigger. Bigger was a wealthy Presbyterian solicitor; like her father an avid antiquarian (he co-edited the journal of the Irish Folklore Society with Milligan's sister Charlotte); and a celebrated host. To his house, Ard Righ, on the northern shore of Belfast Lough, Bigger attracted the poets and writers of the "Northern Revival" (among them Seumus McManus, Helen Waddell, Herbert Hughes, and Margaret Pender) as well other prominent culturati. It was at Ard Righ that Milligan first met, among the regular visitors, James Connolly, Roger Casement and W.B. Yeats. Walking with her on Cave Hill above Ard Righ ("holy" to Milligan as the site where Wolfe Tone and McCracken pledged themselves to Irish independence), Yeats disappointed Milligan. He failed “to warm to the least mention of '98". Milligan's passion for "'98" was shared by Bigger (he had a room in Ard Arigh dedicated to the rebellion). Together they sought to organise a Belfast commemoration of the 1798 centenary. Milligan produced a six-penny Life of Theobald Wolfe Tone (Belfast, 1898). However, the descendants of the "Protestant leaders and peasants" who, according to Milligan, had sealed Tone's union of creeds on "the battle field and scaffold", effectively restricted any commemorative display to Catholic districts. A processive outing (organised