Kilkenny was regarded as a stronghold of the Confederation, and Dillon suggested it should be the objective.

Dillon and Meagher quitted Dublin to seek O'Brien; Reilly and Smyth started for Tipperary, and M'Gee for Scotland where it was hoped the Glasgow Irish could be induced to rise, seize some of the Clyde steamers and effect a landing in Sligo or Mayo which might rouse Connacht and western Ulster to the assistance of the South.
Dillon and Meagher left Dublin on the night of the 22nd of July by the mailcoach for Enniscorthy.

Neither had the slightest hope of a successful insurrection, but they felt that honour and its future survival demanded that a nation must reply to the command of a foreign power to gag its mouth and throw down its arms by drawing the sword.
They found Smith O'Brien at Enniscorthy and he joined in their views.
Father Parle and the people of Enniscorthy undertook to defend O'Brien by force of arms if any attempt were made to arrest him there, and agreed that if he went into Kilkenny and Tipperary and succeeded in arousing those counties Wexford would take up arms.

O'Brien and his colleagues moved towards Kilkenny through Graiguenamanagh where the people received them with enthusiasm, and they arrived in what they hoped to make again the provisional capital of Ireland in the evening of the 23rd of July.
[Illustration: Terence Bellew MacManus] The considerations in favour of beginning the insurrection in Kilkenny were sound.

It was the one Irish city of importance inaccessible to British naval power, it offered a convenient rallying-centre for the counties of Tipperary, Waterford, and Wexford upon which the Young Ireland leaders relied, the country around it was well-adapted for defensive fighting against superior forces, and it had an historic appeal to the Irish imagination.