Father James Dixon was one of the three convict priests transported from Ireland among the 560 Irishmen so punished after the 1798 Rebellion of the United Irishmen, a joint Protestant and Catholic uprising led by the Ulsterman Wolfe Tone and inspired by the French Revolution principles of liberty, equality and fraternity. Father Dixon was described as a "kind and inoffensive man, rather wanting in energy and decision". A priest of Ferns diocese, he was not the stuff …
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…and unsuccessfully tried to persuade the rebels to surrender, permission to say Mass was withdrawn and he eventually lost his salary. He had failed to prevent seditious talk among his Mass-goers. We know little of his activity after this until he received his pardon on George III's birthday in 1809. He returned to Ireland that year, becoming parish priest of Crossabeg in 1819 after working as an assistant at New Ross in South Wexford. He died in 1840.