March 20th , 1780
Myles (or Miles) Byrne (20 March 1780 – 24 January 1862) was an insurgent leader in Wexford in the Irish Rebellion of 1798 and a fighter in the continued guerrilla struggle against British Crown forces in the Wicklow Hills until 1802. In 1803 collaborated closely with Robert Emmet in plans for a renewed insurrection in Dublin.
After these misfired, he took a commission in Napoleon’s Irish Legion, seeing action in the Low Countries, Spain and at the Battle of Leipzig. Under the Bourbon Restoration he was deployed to Greece, and retired as a chef de bataillon. In his later years, he was the Paris correspondent for the Young Irelander paper The Nation, and dictated his memoirs. In these, he advanced the image of the United Irishmen as a cohesive revolutionary organisation dedicated to the achievement of a national democratic government.
