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Winifred Carney

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Winifred Carney
Portrait of Carney, c. 1912
Born
Maria Winifred Carney

(1887-12-04)4 December 1887
Bangor, County Down, Ireland, UK
Died21 November 1943(1943-11-21) (aged 55)
Belfast, Northern Ireland, UK
Resting placeMilltown Cemetery
NationalityIrish
Other namesWinnie Carney
BildungChristian Brothers School in Donegall Street
OccupationTrade unionist
Employer(s)Irish Textile Workers' Union, Irish Transport and General Workers Union
Known forPolitical and labour activism, participation in the 1916 Rising
Political party
MovementGaelic League, Cumann na mBan, Irish Citizen Army
Spouse
George McBride
​
(m. 1928)​

Maria Winifred ("Winnie") Carney (4 December 1887 – 21 November 1943), was an Irish suffragist, trade unionist and republican, a participant in the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin, and a Northern Ireland Labour Party activist. 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,[1] Carney was the daughter of commercial traveler Alfred Carney and Sarah Cassidy who had married in Belfast on 25 February 1873. She had six siblings.[2]

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. Carney was educated at the Christian Brothers School in Donegall Street in the city, later teaching at the school. She enrolled at Hughes Commercial Academy around 1910, where she qualified as a secretary and shorthand typist, one of the first women in Belfast to do so.[3]

Trade unionist

While working as a clerk and became involved in the Gaelic League, in the women's suffrage movement and in trade unionism. In 1912, giving up position as a solicitorʼs clerk in Dungannon, she succeeded her friend Marie Johnson as secretary of the Irish Textile Workers' Union, a post in which she earned just 1/3 of the wage of mill workers she was helping organise.[4]

The union functioned as the women's section of the Irish Transport and General Workers Union whose Belfast Branch Secretary and Ulster Organiser, was James Connolly.[5] Together, in 1913, they wrote the Manifesto to the Linen Slaves of Belfast which stated:[6]

Many Belfast mills are slaughterhouses for the women and penitentiaries for the children. But while the world is deploring your conditions, they also unite in deploring your slavish and servile nature in submitting to them: they unite in wondering what material these Belfast women are made, who refuse to unite together and fight to better their conditions… Sisters and Fellow-workers, talk this matter over, do not be frightened by the timid counsels and fears of weaklings. Be brave. Have confidence in yourselves. Talk about success, and you will achieve success….

Carney helped keep the union running during Connolly’s many absences from Belfast, and during the great Dublin lock-out in 1913, raised funds and organised practical support and accommodation for locked-out workers and their families who took temporary refuge in Belfast.

At the same time, sharing Connolly's republican politics, she joined Cumann na mBan.[7], the women's auxiliary of the Irish Volunteers, and attended its first meeting in 1914, with Connolly's daughters, Nora and Ina Connolly.[8]

Easter Rising

The Dublin General Post Office, wherein Carney was with Connolly during the 1916 Easter Rising.

While she was in Cumann na mBan, Carney taught first aid and developed a proficiency for handling a rifle. On 14 April 1916, she was summoned by Connolly to join him in the Dublin General Post Office (GPO),[9] armed with a typewriter and a Webley revolver.[10] Initially, Carney was the only woman in what was to serve as the rebel's headquarters.[11] While not a combatant, she was given the Irish Citizen Army (ICA) rank of adjutant and served Connolly as aide-de-camp. Despite orders from both Pearse and Connolly,[12] after Connolly was wounded, she refused to leave his side,[13] and was among the final group (including Connolly and Patrick Pearse,Elizabeth O'Farrell and Julia Grenan) to leave the GPO when it became engulfed in flames. They made their new headquarters in nearby Moore Street before Pearse surrendered. [14]

After her capture, she was held in Kilmainham Gaol and was then moved to Mountjoy Prison. Carney, alongside Helena Molony, Maria Perolz, Brigid Foley and Ellen O'Ryan and others were moved to an English prison. 69 women were released from prison one week after the execution of the Rising's leaders. By August 1916 Carney was imprisoned in Aylesbury prison with Nell Ryan and Helena Molony.[14] The three requested that their internee status, and the privileges it brought, be revoked so that they would be held as normal prisoners with Constance Markievicz. Their request was denied. Carney and Molony were released two days before Christmas 1916.[14][15] After the Anglo-Irish Treaty and the formation of the Irish Free State, Carney sided with the Anti-Treaty forces, and was arrested several times.[16]

Party-political commitments

In the 1918 United Kingdom general election, supported by Marie Johnson and by Gaelic-League veteran Alice Milligan, Carney stood on a Workers’ Republic platform for Sinn Féin in Belfast Victoria. It was a solidly loyalist constituency, and with no support from her party, she polled just 539 votes behind the Belfast Labour Party (3,469), the victorious Labour Unionist (9,309).[17]

She continued to work for the ITGWU while retaining the confidence of the IRA leadership in the north. She was secretary of the Irish Republican Prisoners’ Dependents Fund 1920-22, and in her home at Carlisle Circus sheltered republicans such as Constance Markievicz and Austin Stack[5] In July 1922, her house was raided by the police. Among other "seditious papers" seized were several letters from Michael Collins, The Complete Grammar of Anarchy (1919) (in which John J.Horgan indicts unionists for Ireland's revolutionary unrest),[18] and Karl Kautsky's "The Dictatorship of the Proletariat".[4]: 8  She was held for 18 days.[5]

Following the Civil War, Carney, who been imprisoned several time for her anti-Treaty position,[16] was increasingly disillusioned with the republican leadership. She was highly critical of the social conservatism of Éamon de Valera,[19] and, relenting only weeks before her death, refused to accept a pension for her part in 1916 from his Fianna Fáil government.[5]

By 1924 she had become a member of the Court branch of BLP's successor, the Northern Ireland Labour Party.[20] The branch secretary Tommy Geehen, a Catholic textile worker who from 1927 associated with the Workers' Party of Ireland (WPI), a Communist group led by Connolly's son, Roddy.[21] From 1933, Carney identified with the party's left-wing affiliate, the Socialist Party of Northern Ireland.[20] A mainly Protestant organisation, with around 150 member in the Shankill and Newtownards Road districts of Belfast,[22][23] it included Jack Macgougan, secretary from 1935 onwards, and Victor Halley.[24]

In June 1934, together with ICA veteran Jack White, and under the auspices of the left-wing Republican Congress, Carney and her husband George McBride turned up at the annual Wolfe Tone commemoration at Bodenstown with a contingent of 200 from McBride's home district, the Protestant Shankill Road in Belfast.[4] Together with a further Belfast contingent from Ballymacarrett, they were attacked by IRA men who objected to their "red" ("Break The Connection with Capitalism") banner.[25] The following day, the Irish Times remarked on the irony of southern Catholics preventing northern Protestants from honouring the memory of a United Irishman.[4]: 10  From the summer of 1936, Carny and McBride worked with other socialists to organise support for the republican side in the Spanish Civil War.[4]: 10  Again they found themselves at odds with catholic nationalist sentiment. (Campaigning in north Belfast, NILP leader Harry Midgley had his election rallies broken up by nationalists chanting "Up Franco", "Remember Spain", and "We want Franco'").[26]

Later life and death

Courtesy: 1916IrishCollector
Winifred Carney's 1916 and War of Independence Medals from the Dullaghan Private Collection[27][non-primary source needed]

Carney had met her husband in the NILP in 1924. A working-class Protestant from the Shankill Road, George McBride was a former Ulster Volunteer, and war veteran[28] (while she had been at the GPO, he been in the trenches at the Somme).[29][30] He shared her socialist commitment, but not her continued defence of the Easter Rising.[31] Facing opposition from both their families, in 1928 they married in Wales with no relatives present.[29][32] Her father never spoke to her again.[33]

Carney continued continued working for the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union,[34] but in the late 1930s a number of serious health problems limited her political activities.[35] Carney died of TB in Belfast on 21 November 1943, aged 55.[5]

Commemoration

After a small funeral, she was buried in an unmarked grave at Milltown Cemetery.[36] In 1985, the National Graves Association, Belfast erected a gravestone which acknowledged her marriage to McBride.[32] Living his last years in an Ulster Volunteers Old Soldiersʼ Home in East Belfast,[4] in 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.[33] He died shortly thereafter, and was buried in an unmarked grave in Clandeboye Cemetery in Bangor. In 2016 the Belfast and District Trades Union Council erected a headstone for him with representatives from both families attending. An display, telling the story of Carney and McBride, was mounted at Belfast City Hall.[29]

Following a proposal for the Winifred Carney statue was brought before Belfast City Council by Sinn Féin in 2017,[37] on International Women's Day (8 March) 2024 her likeness (alongside a statue of the United Irishwoman, social reformer and abolitionist Mary Ann McCracken) was unveiled on the grounds of Belfast City Hall. The bronze statue depicts Carney in the uniform of Irish Citizens Army.[38]

References

  1. ^ Carney Family's 1911 Census Form
  2. ^ Quinn, James (2009). "Carney, Winifred ('Winnie') | Dictionary of Irish Biography". www.dib.ie. Retrieved 9 March 2024.
  3. ^ Ryan, Louise; Ward, Margaret (2007). Irish Women and The Vote: Becoming Citizens. Wales: Irish Academic Press. pp. 195–200, 202–205. ISBN 978-0-7165-3393-1.
  4. ^ a b c d e f Tallon, Ruth (2016). Winnifred and George (PDF). Belfast: Failte Feirste Thiar.
  5. ^ a b c d e Quinn, James (2009). "Carney, Winifred ('Winnie') | Dictionary of Irish Biography". www.dib.ie. Retrieved 9 March 2024.
  6. ^ Watterson, Rebecca (9 November 2022). "Linen Mills in Nineteenth-Century Belfast: Lichen, Lungs and Loss of Limbs". Epidemic Belfast. Retrieved 9 March 2024.
  7. ^ New Ulster Biography
  8. ^ Irish women and the First World War, part 3 – Women and the 1916 Rising, by Lynda Walker
  9. ^ McCarthy, pgs. 58-59.
  10. ^ McCarthy, Cal (2007). Cumann Na mBan and the Irish Revolution. Cork: The Collins Press. p. 64. ISBN 978-1-905172146.
  11. ^ Women's Involvement in the Irish Easter Uprising of 1916, Dr. Marybeth Carlson – University of Dayton
  12. ^ Nevin, Donal (2006). James Connolly 'A Full Life'. Dublin: Gill & Macmillan. pp. 408–412, 657. ISBN 978-07171-2962-1.
  13. ^ Eight Women of the Easter Rising The New York Times, 16 March 2016
  14. ^ a b c Matthews, Ann (2010). Renegades, Irish Republican Women 1900–1922. Dublin: Mercier History. pp. 124–158. ISBN 978-1-85635-684-8.
  15. ^ Internment by John McGuffin
  16. ^ a b Irish Political Prisoners, 1848–1922: Theatres of War By Seán McConville
  17. ^ Ryan, Louise; Ward, Margaret (2007). Irish Women and The Vote: Becoming Citizens. Wales: Irish Academic Press. pp. 195–200, 202–205. ISBN 978-0-7165-3393-1.
  18. ^ Murphy, Brian (1988). "The Canon of Irish Cultural History: Some Questions". Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review. 77 (305): (68–83), 78. ISSN 0039-3495.
  19. ^ "The Dictionary of Ulster Biography". newulsterbiography.co.uk. Retrieved 28 October 2015.
  20. ^ a b Quinn, James (2009). "Carney, Winifred ('Winnie') | Dictionary of Irish Biography". www.dib.ie. Retrieved 9 March 2024.
  21. ^ Walker, Graham (1984). "The Northern Ireland Labour Party in the 1920s". Saothar. 10: (19–30), 24. ISSN 0332-1169.
  22. ^ Tallon, Ruth (2016). Winnifred and George (PDF). Belfast: Failte Feirste Thiar.
  23. ^ Ronaldo Munck and Bill Rolston, Belfast in the thirties: an oral history, p. 147
  24. ^ "Letting Labour Lead: Jack Macgougan and the Pursuit of Unity, 1913-1958", Saothar, No. 14
  25. ^ Byrne (1994), pp. 23-24.
  26. ^ Bardon, Jonathan (1992). A History of Ulster. Belfast: The Blackstaff Press. p. 544. ISBN 0856404764.
  27. ^ "Early Irish Militaria – Mostly 1916 Easter Rising, WWII Emergency Period Public Group – Facebook". facebook.com. Retrieved 10 May 2016.
  28. ^ See Allison Murphy, Winnie & George: An Unlikely Union (Cork: Mercier Press, 2017) for an account of the marriage and other aspects of Carney's life.
  29. ^ a b c Millsop, Sandra (2019). "The Story of George McBride and Winifred Carney". www.bangorhistoricalsocietyni.org. Retrieved 9 March 2024.
  30. ^ Murphy, Allison (2017). "Across the divide: The story of republican Winnie Carney and unionist George McBride". The Irish News. Retrieved 9 March 2024.
  31. ^ Murphy, Allison (2017). Winnie and George, an Unlikely Union. Mercier Press. ISBN 9781781174708.
  32. ^ a b "Winifred Carney - A Century Of Women". www.acenturyofwomen.com. Retrieved 9 March 2024.
  33. ^ a b Sweeney, Joanne (2017). "Across the divide: The story of republican Winnie Carney and unionist George McBride". The Irish News. Retrieved 9 March 2024.
  34. ^ "Culture Northern Ireland". Archived from the original on 8 March 2012. Retrieved 26 November 2009.
  35. ^ "Seven Women of the Labour Movement 1916, by Sinéad McCoole" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 26 November 2020. Retrieved 26 November 2009.
  36. ^ "Milltown: a history of Belfast told through its most famous cemetery". The Irish Times. Retrieved 9 March 2024.
  37. ^ "Mary Ann McCracken and Winifred Carney statues to be erected at Belfast City Hall". BBC News. 2 June 2021. Retrieved 9 March 2024.
  38. ^ "Mary Ann McCracken and Winfred Carney statues unveiled on International Women's Day". Belfast City Council. Retrieved 9 March 2024.

Further reading

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