ABSTRACT
In the last but one paragraph, the author alludes to ‘illnatured and envious aspersions that have been thrown out against this ancient and honourable institution’. He could have had in mind some anti-masonic pamphlets such as Masonry the Way to Hell (1768).9 But more likely, he was trying to counter the criticisms made against the radical activities of some county committees, as Mirala quite rightly points out.10 In the 1790s ad hoc committees of local lodges became county committees composed of all the masters of the lodges of a single county.11 Not all committees were politically minded like the two near Derry. e Armagh Committee was very conservative, composed of supporters of Edmund Burke, who published the Re ections on the Revolution a little before it was founded, in 1790, while the 1791 Tyrone Committee appeared in the wake of omas Paine’s Rights of Man (part 1) and was composed of radicals.12 In the last paragraph James Mullalla praises the Dublin committee, probably as opposed to a radical county committee such as the Tyrone one. He clearly vindicates Freemasonry as a respectable institution, just as Donoughmore did.
