The men who, in October 1791, gathered in a Belfast tavern to propose a reform of the Irish Parliament on "principles of civil, political and religious liberty" were Protestants in what was then a largely Protestant town. With the exception of Thomas Russell, a former India-service army-officer from Cork, and Theobald Wolfe Tone, a Dublin barrister, they were Presbyterians. As Dissenters from the established Anglican (Church of Ireland) communion they were conscious of having shared, in part, the civil and political disabilities of the Kingdom's dispossessed Roman Catholic majority.