Irish republicanism () is the political movement for the unity and independence of Ireland under a republic. Irish republicans view British rule in any part of Ireland as inherently illegitimate. The development of nationalist and democratic sentiment throughout Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, distilled into the contemporary ideology known as republican radicalism, was reflected in Ireland in the emergence of republicanism, in opposition to British rule. Discrimination against Catholics and Protestant nonconformists, attempts by the British administration to suppress Irish culture, and the belief that Ireland was economically disadvantaged as a result of the Acts of Union were among the specific factors leading to such opposition. The Society of United Irishmen, formed in 1791 and led primarily by liberal Protestants, launched the 1798 Rebellion with the help of troops sent by Revolutionary France, but the uprising failed. A second rising in 1803 led by Irish patriot Robert Emmet was quickly put down on 23 July 1803. The Young Ireland movement, formed in the 1830s, broke with Daniel O'Connell's Repeal Association because it believed that armed struggle was legitimate. Some members of Young Ireland staged an abortive rising in 1848. Its leaders were transported to Van Diemen's Land. Some of these escaped to the United States, where they linked up with other Irish exiles to form the Fenian Brotherhood. Together with the Irish Republican Brotherhood, founded in Ireland by James Stephens and others in 1858, they made up a movement commonly known as "Fenians" which was dedicated to the overthrow of British imperial rule in Ireland. They staged another rising, the Fenian Rising, in 1867, and a dynamite campaign in England in the 1880s. In the early 20th century IRB members, in particular Tom Clarke and Seán MacDermott, began planning another rising. The Easter Rising took place from 24 to 30 April 1916, when members of the Irish Volunteers and Irish Citizen Army seized the centre of Dublin, proclaimed a republic and held off British forces for almost a week. The rebels were at first viewed as extremists and the Irish public generally favoured Home Rule, but the execution of the Rising's leaders (including Clarke, MacDermott, Patrick Pearse and James Connolly) led to a surge of support for republicanism in Ireland. In 1917 the Sinn Féin party stated as its aim the "securing the international recognition of Ireland as an independent Irish Republic", and in the general election of