Defenders

Irish Catholic secret society that emerged in County Armagh in the mid-1780s in opposition to the Protestant Peep o'Day Boys. In 1795 a large Defender force drawn from several counties was defeated by Protestants at the Battle of the Diamond, County Armagh, after which the Protestants formed the Orange Order. In the same year the United Irishmen allied themselves with the Defenders as part of their plan for armed rebellion. The Defender movement survived the Rebellion of 1798 and re-emerged in the 19th century as the Ribbonmen.

More than a grass-roots protest group, the Defenders soon developed a sense of political awareness as well as organizational structures copied from freemasonry. Defenderism spread from Armagh into adjacent counties in 1789, and reached Dublin and Connaught in the early 1790s.