Local historian Brian O’Cleirigh at John Hay’s grave in Kilmallock cemetery, Ballymurn
Eager to see his eldest son further his studies, Harvey sent Edward to France, and later Germany and Italy, to attend schools there as a teenager.
And it was in France that the first seeds of rebellion and radicalisation were sewn in the mind of the young Wexford man. In her article Edward Hay: Historian of 1798, Margaret Ó hOgartaigh writes, Returning from the continent.where Catholics were members of the ruling elite, to Ireland where a Catholic was scarcely considered a human being, irked him.
Although he had, up to this point, lived in relative luxury, Hay was acutely aware of the plight of Irish Catholics and their continued persecution at the hands of the Protestant rulers.