In a public debate following Belfast's 1792 "Bastille Day" celebrations, Cunningham's objection to an immediate and liberal extension of the franchise to include Catholics was defeated by interventions from members of a new democratic club. The Society of United Irishmen proposed the "equal representation of all the people" in the Irish parliament and its "real independence" from England. If there were family connections on Jane Greg's path to these radical reformers they were likely, not her father and his associates, but her sister-in-law. Jane Greg spent most of her adulthood in England in the society of her younger brother Samuel Greg. In Manchester Samuel, who with his maternal uncles rose to be one of the great northern "cotton kings", married Hannah Lightbody. Like many northern merchant families, the Lighbodys were Unitarians, their indulgence of "rational dissent" broadly comparable to the "New Light" teaching of Belfast's Glasgow-educated Presbyterian clergy. Hannah completed her education at a Unitarian academy at Stoke Newington outside London, where she live with her cousin Thomas Rogers, a close friend and an immediate neighbour to Richard Price.