Winifred Carney

Maria Winifred "Winnie" Carney (4 December 1887 – 21 November 1943), was an Irish republican, a participant in the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin and, as a trade union secretary, women's suffragist, and socialist party member, a lifelong social and political activist in Belfast. In March 2024, a statue to her was unveiled on the grounds of Belfast City Hall.

Early life Born into a lower-middle class Catholic family at Fisher's Hill in Bangor, County Down, Carney was the daughter of commercial traveller Alfred Carney and Sarah Cassidy who had married in Belfast on 25 February 1873. She had six siblings.

Winifred and her family moved to Falls Road in Belfast when she was a child, where her mother ran a small sweet shop. Her father, a Protestant, later left the family, leaving her mother to support them. Two brothers left for America, and two sisters for the convent. Carney, educated at the Christian Brothers School in Donegall Street in the city, taught at the school before qualifying, around 1911, as a secretary and shorthand typist, one of the first women in Belfast to do so.

Carney took an early interest in the work of the Gaelic League (Conradh na Gaeilge) was officially a branch of the Irish Women Workers' Union led in Dublin by Delia Larkin. In practice it functioned, in Belfast, as the women's section of James Larkin's Irish Transport and General Workers Union. The ITGWU branch secretary in Belfast was the republican socialist James Connolly. with Carney, Connolly produced a Manifesto to the Linen Slaves of Belfast (1913) that revealed his frustration as an organiser: any Belfast mills are slaughterhouses for the women and penitentiaries for the children. But while all the world is deploring your conditions, they also unite in deploring your slavish and servile nature in submitting to them; they unite in wondering of what material these Belfast women are made, who refuse to unite together and fight to better their conditions.It did not always "hinder women from fighting together when circumstances demanded it" ), but the rate of organization among the female textile workers in Belfast remained low. The ITWU's predominantly Catholic membership may not have greatly exceeded the 300 subscribed under Johnson. To Carney, Connolly conceded that its survival was largely a matter of "keeping the Falls Road crowd together". for their children sheltered by sympathetic families in Belfast. The press counted her among the "Don't Give a Damn League", a reference to Grimley's assertion that she did not "care a damn" if at their rallies and meetings police were present.

Suffragist The Belfast-based Irish Women's Suffrage Society was not an affiliate of the Dublin-based Irish Women's Franchise League, which campaigned unsuccessfully to have votes for women included in the 1912 Home Rule Bill. In as much as they argued that a Dublin parliament would block further advances for women, in the IWSS Carney was joining with women who were unionist. Among them were Elizabeth McCracken (the writer "L.A.M. Priestley") and Elizabeth Bell (the first woman in Ireland to qualify as a gynaecologist), and Margaret McCoubrey (whom Carney was later to encounter in the Northern Ireland Labour Party). While largely middle-class women, they spoke at street corners and held dinner hour meetings at factory and mill gates in Belfast to get working class women involved.

In April 1914, the IWSS dissolved. With the other activists, Carney had transferred her loyalty to the Belfast branch of the direct-action Women's Social and Political Union But in March 1914, after being doorstepped for four days in London, Edward Carson ruled that Unionists could not take a position on so divisive an issue as women's suffrage, and the WSPU declared an end to "the truce we have held in Ulster". These included the Ulster Volunteers' centre at Abbeylands House, could have very different connotations". But it is certain that, following Britain's declaration of war on Germany in August 1914, she would have supported Margaret McCoubrey

In 1915, McCracken invited Christabel's renegade sister, Sylvia Pankhurst, to Belfast to speak in support equal pay for women doing war work. Carney may have met her on that occasion: correspondence with Sylvia Pankhurst was among the papers seized when police raided Carney's home in July 1922. In Constance Markievicz's nationalist youth, Na Fianna Éireann ("Soldiers of Ireland"), and then from April 1914 in the women's auxiliary of the Irish Volunteers, Cumann na mBan, Carney (alongside Connolly's daughters Nora and Ina) had received a degree of military training. She recalled:When we have settled in to our occupation and the Tricolour floats from the Post Office standard Connolly takes me out to the centre of O’Connell Street to see the Flag of the Republic wave on high and we shake hands. Meantime the Proclamation is read by [Patrick] Pearse in front of the G.P.O. During that week (24-29 April) she served as Connolly's aide de camp with the rank of adjutant (the ICA had the distinction of giving women "rank and duty just as if they were men"). After Connolly was wounded, she refused to leave his side. In the morning of the last day, Friday 29 April, she took his dictation for an address read to the assembled GPO rebels: "Courage boys, we are winning, and in the hour of our victory let us not forget the splendid women who have everywhere stood by us and cheered us on. Never had a man or a woman a grander cause, never was a cause more grandly served". Of 30 women who to that point had remained, with its upper floors burning, in the GPO, with Julia Grenan and Elizabeth O'Farrell, Carney was to be the last to evacuate. With the final group of fighters, they bore Connolly on a stretcher to Moore Street, from where O'Farrell carried Pearse's request for terms to the British commander, Brigadier-General Lowe.

Interned, Carney was transferred in the summer to Aylesbury Prison in England. There, held on remand with Nell Ryan and Helena Molony, she was denied permission to join Markievicz (who had been the ICA second-in-command at the Royal College of Surgeons) in the convicted prison population. Carney and Molony were released two days before Christmas 1916. Markievicz was amnestied in the new year.

Left-wing republican

Supported by her friends Marie Johnson and Alice Milligan, secretly written by a self-styled "Irish Bolshevik", Cathal O'Shannon, was headed by Connolly's strapline from The Workers' Republic: "The great only appear great because we are on our knees. LET US RISE!." It declared her resolve to fight conscription (although with the just-concluded German armistice, the danger of this was passing) and partition "with the same weapons, and same spirit and determination with which I fought, and am ready to fight again, for the Republic" took 3,469; the victorious Labour Unionist 9,309.

She was held for 18 days. (these, she had insisted, related only to her work for the relief of internees). Relenting only as she lay dying in her last weeks, Carney refused to accept from Dublin a pension for her part in 1916.

In 1920, Carney had attended an Independent Labour Party convention in Glasgow — that allowed for an uneasy co-operation between republican labour and those who, despite its refusal to organise in Northern Ireland, looked to the Labour Party in Britain.

Marriage to George McBride In the NILP, Carney met George McBride. A working-class Protestant, ten years her junior, from the Shankill Road, McBride was a former Ulster Volunteer, and war veteran While she had been at the GPO, as a Lewis gunner with the 36th (Ulster) Division he had been moving up toward the trenches on the Somme. From the experience of the battlefield and of German captivity he had emerged as an internationalist and as an atheist. Anticipating the reaction of his workmates to his marrying a republican, McBride had resigned his job at the Mackie engineering works; opened a small leather-good business, and taken a position as a National Council of Labour Colleges lecturer in Economic History. The following year, the couple joined the Socialist Party of Northern Ireland (SPNI), it included Jack Macgougan, secretary from 1935 onwards, and Victor Halley.

In June 1934, with other party members (and with Jack White) On the approach to Tone's graveside, the visitors were blocked by members of Tipperary IRA who seized and ripped their "red" ("Break The Connection with Capitalism") banner. The banner was carried later that day to the graveside of James Connolly at Arbour Hill in Dublin. The 36 members of the Shankill Road James Connolly Republican Club attending described themselves as "the vanguard of Protestant workers entering into active participation in the fight for an Irish Workers' Republic".

The Congress was unable to achieve left-republican unity. In September, Carney and McBride were delegates to a conference in Rathmines,

From the summer of 1936, Carney and McBride worked with other socialists to organise support for the republican side in the Spanish Civil War.

Death and commemoration

Carney's health deteriorated sharply in the late 1930s. On 21 November 1943, she died in Belfast of TB, aged 55. A grand-niece has suggested that this was due to her brother Ernest’s continued disapproval of her marriage to McBride. He spent his last decade in what had been the house of Sir James Craig, an Ulster Volunteer rest home in east Belfast. There, in March 1988, McBride witnessed on television the loyalist terrorist Michael Stone run over his wife's grave during his gun and grenade attack on an IRA funeral. He died a month later. Denied access by his brother-in-law to his wife's plot at Milltown, he was buried in an unmarked grave in Clandeboye Cemetery in Bangor. in 2017 Sinn Féin councilors proposed a monument to Carney. A concession to unionist sensibilities that would have incorporated a representation of her husband was rejected (McBride appears with Carney in stained glass windows at the Duncairn Arts Centre in north Belfast). Together with another bronze by the same artist, Ralph Sander, of the United Irishwoman and abolitionist Mary Ann McCracken, the figure of Carney was unveiled in front of the city hall on International Women's Day (8 March) 2024. Carney is depicted—typewriter on one side, Webley revolver on the other—in her 1916 Citizen Army uniform.

Played by Eithne Lydon, Winifred Carney appears in the 1966 RTÉ drama series on the 1916 Rising, Insurrection. She is a chief protagonist in a 2015 graphic novel, designed with a learning pack on the Easter Rising for secondary schools in Northern Ireland.

Biographies

Allison Murphy, Winnie & George: An Unlikely Union, Mercier Press, , 2017 Diane Urquart, Women in Ulster politics, 1890–1940, Irish Academic Press, , 2000. Margaret Ward, Unmanageable revolutionaries, Pluto Press, , 1995 Helga Woggon, Silent radical, Winifred Carney 1887–1943: a reconstruction of her autobiography, SIPTU, Irish Labour History Society, 2000.