Winifred Carney | |
|---|---|
 Portrait of Carney, c. 1912 | |
| Born | Maria Winifred Carney (1887-12-04)4 December 1887 Bangor, County Down, Ireland, UK |
| Died | 21 November 1943(1943-11-21) (aged 55) |
| Resting place | Milltown Cemetery |
| Other names | Winnie Carney |
| Education | Christian Brothers School, Donegall Street, Belfast |
| Occupation | Trade unionist |
| Employer(s) | Irish Textile Workers' Union,Irish Transport and General Workers Union |
| Known for | Political and labour activism, participation in the 1916 Rising |
| Political party | |
| Movement | Gaelic League,Irish Women's Suffrage Society,Women's Social and Political Union,Na Fianna Éireann,Cumann na mBan,Irish Citizen Army |
| Spouse | |
Maria Winifred "Winnie"Carney (4 December 1887 – 21 November 1943), was anIrish republican, a participant in the1916 Easter Rising inDublin, and inBelfast—as atrade union secretary, women's suffragist, and socialist party member—a lifelong social and political activist. In March 2024, a statue to her was unveiled on the grounds ofBelfast City Hall.
Born into a lower-middle class Catholic family at Fisher's Hill inBangor, County Down, 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.[1]
Winifred and her family moved toFalls Road in Belfast when she was a child, where her mother ran a small sweet shop. Her father, aProtestant, later left the family, leaving her mother to support them. Two brothers left for America, and two sisters for theconvent.[2]: 38 Carney, educated at theChristian Brothers School in Donegall Street in the city, taught at the school before qualifying, around 1911, as a secretary andshorthand typist, one of the first women in Belfast to do so.[3]
Carney took an early interest in the work of theGaelic League (Conradh na Gaeilge)[4]: 11 and of theIrish Women's Suffrage Society,[2]: 39
In 1912, she resigned a position with a solicitor inDungannon, to succeed her friend,Marie Johnson, in the poor and irregularly paid position of secretary to the Irish Textile Workers' Union.[4]: 12 The union, a rival toMary Galway's more cautious Textile Operatives Society,[5][6] was officially a branch of theIrish Women Worker's Union led in Dublin byDelia Larkin. In practice it functioned, in Belfast, as the women's section ofJames Larkin'sIrish Transport and General Workers Union. The ITGWU branch secretary in Belfast was the republican socialistJames Connolly.[4]: 11
In June 1913, while claiming that "the ranks of the Irish Textile Workers’ Union are being recruited by hundreds",[7] with Carney Connolly produced aManifesto to the Linen Slaves of Belfast (1913)[8] that revealed his frustration as an organiser:[9]: 29
[M]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"[9]: 44 (they had strucken masse in 1874,[9]: 31 in 1906.[9]: 40 and again in 1911 during which the ITWU had been formed[10]), but the rate of organisation 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.[11] To Carney, Connolly conceded that its survival was largely a matter of "keeping the Falls Road crowd together".[4]: 11
During the greatDublin lock-out in the autumn of 1913, with her trade union comradesEllen [Gordon] Grimley andCathal O'Shannon, Carney raised funds and organised support for the workers and (in a "holiday" scheme devised byDora Montefiore)[12] for their children sheltered by sympathetic families in Belfast.[13] 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.[14]
The Belfast-basedIrish Women's Suffrage Society was not an affiliate of the Dublin-basedIrish Women's Franchise League, which campaigned unsuccessfully to have votes for women included in the1912 Home Rule Bill.[15] Inasmuch 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 wereElizabeth McCracken (the writer "L.A.M. Priestley") andElizabeth Bell (the first woman in Ireland to qualify as a gynaecologist), andMargaret McCoubrey (whom Carney was later to encounter in theNorthern Ireland Labour Party).[16][17] While largely middle-class women, they spoke at street corners and held dinner hour meetings at factory and mill gates Belfast to get working class women to involved.[18]
In April 1914, the IWSS dissolved.[19] With the other activists, Carney had transferred her loyalty to the Belfast branch of thedirect-actionWomen's Social and Political Union[2]: 84–85 being organised byChristabel Pankhurst's emissary from England,Dorothy Evans. The WSPU believed they had had an understanding with theUlster Unionist Council based on its inclusion of votes for women in draft articles of the Provisional Government (readied for Ulster should a Dublin parliament be restored). With regard to an Irish parliament, thenationalists would make no such undertaking.[20][21] 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".[21]
A result was that Carney joined the WSPU just as its militants launched a campaign of arson attacks against Unionist-associated properties.[22] These included theUlster Volunteers' centre at Abbeylands House,[2]: 85 and culminated in Dorothy Evans creating an uproar in court by demanding to know whyJames Craig, who was then equipping the Volunteers with German arms, was not appearing on the same weapons and explosives charges.[21]
Carney was not directly involved:[2]: 84–85 Like other suffragists of Catholic background, she would have understood that while "to English eyes, it might have appeared that attacking the property of the Ulster Unionists was no different from attacking government buildings", in the "tense atmosphere of Belfast, which had witnessed many outbreaks of sectarian violence over the years, such actions [of which the Dublin-basedIrish Women's Franchise League disapproved][23] could have very different connotations".[24]: 141 But it is certain that, followingBritain's declaration of war on Germany in August 1914, she would have supportedMargaret McCoubrey[24]: 144 andElizabeth McCracken, in refusing Christabel Pankhurst's directive to disband and cease all activity for the duration.[25]
In 1915, McCracken invited Christabel's renegade sister,Sylvia Pankhurst, to Belfast to speak in support equal pay for women doing war work.[26] 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.[4]: 53
Carney was Connolly's personal, as well as union-branch, secretary. She typed most his articles for the labour press. In the first months of 1916, these included editorials forThe Workers' Republic that built towards a call to arms.[2]: 122–131 They affirmed his conviction that the nation's was labour's cause, decried what he saw as theHome-Rulers "prostitution" of Ireland in Britain'swar with Germany, and proposed that only the "red tide of war on Irish soil" would enable the nation to "recover its self-respect".[27][28]: 172 InConstance Markievicz's nationalist youth,Na Fianna Éireann ("Soldiers of Ireland"), and then from April 1914 in the women's auxiliary of theIrish Volunteers,Cumann na mBan, Carney (alongside Connolly's daughtersNora and Ina) had received a degree of military training.[2]: 59, 85
On 14 April 1916, Connolly summoned Carney to Dublin where she prepared his mobilisation orders for theIrish Citizen Army (ICA). Having set out with the initial garrison party fromLiberty Hall onEaster Monday, Carney (armed with atypewriter and aWebley revolver) was the first woman during theRising to enter theGeneral Post Office.[29][30] She recalled:
When we have settled in to our occupation and theTricolour floats from the Post Office standard Connolly takes me out to the centre ofO’Connell Street to see the Flag of the Republic wave on high and we shake hands. Meantime theProclamation is read by[Patrick] Pearse in front of the G.P.O.[31]
During that week (24-29 April) she served as Connolly'saide de camp with the rank ofadjutant (the ICA had the distinction of giving women "rank and duty just as if they were men").[32] After Connolly was wounded, she refused to leave his side.[33][34] 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".[35]: 3oo Of 30 women who to that point had remained, with its upper floors burning, in the GPO,[36] withJulia Grenan andElizabeth O'Farrell, Carney was to be the last to evacuate. With the final group of fighters, they bore Connolly on a stretcher toMoore Street, from where O'Farrell carried Pearse's request for terms to the British commander,Brigadier-General Lowe.[37]
Interned, Carney was transferred in the summer toAylesbury Prison in England. There, held on remand withNell Ryan andHelena Molony, she was denied permission to join Markievicz (who had been the ICA second-in-command at theRoyal College of Surgeons)[38] in the convicted prison population. Carney and Molony were released two days before Christmas 1916. Markievicz was amnestied in the new year.[37][39]
Supported by her friendsMarie Johnson andAlice Milligan,[3] in the December1918 United Kingdom general election Carney stood forSinn Féin inBelfast Victoria—with Markievicz in Dublin, one of only two women nominated by the republican party. Her manifesto,[40]: 68 secretly written byCathal O'Shannon (self-styled "Irish Bolshevik"),[41] was headed by Connolly's strapline fromThe Workers' Republic: "The great only appear great because we are on our knees. LET US RISE!." It declared her resolve to fightconscription (although with just-concludedGerman armistice, the danger of this was passing) andpartition "with the same weapons, and same spirit and determination with which I fought, and am ready to fight again, for the Republic"[40]: 61–62 Contending with labour rivals in a largely Protestant constituency, and derided by theIrish News as the candidate of "Sinn Féin feminists", Carney polled just 395 votes. The candidate for theBelfast Labour Party (BLP) (the majority of whom favoured, as the alternative to partition, all-Ireland home rule)[42][43]: 22 took 3,469; the victoriousLabour Unionist 9,309.[40]: 63–64
Carney continued to work for the ITGWU while retaining the confidence of theIrish Republican Army leadership in the north. She was secretary of the Irish Republican Prisoners’ Dependents Fund 1920-22, and in her home at 2A Carlisle Circus sheltered republicans such asMarkievicz andAustin Stack[1] In July 1922, her house was raided by the police. Among the "seditious papers" seized was correspondence withMichael Collins and other leading republicans, a membership card for theSocialist Party of Ireland, and a collection of political pamphlets. These includedThe Significance of Sinn Féin,Jack White's argument that the republic would not be achieved without a socialist appeal to labour;The Bolshevik Revolution, its Rise and Meaning (1919) byMaxim Litvinov, the futureSoviet foreign minister who had been in Belfast exile; andThe Dictatorship of the Proletariat (1918) in which the GermanMarxist,Karl Kautsky, takes issue withCommunist partydictatorship.[4]: 51–54
She was held for 18 days.[1] Released on health grounds, she was later convicted and fined £2 for possession of documents “relating to the Third Northern Division of theIRA”[44]: 8 (these, she had insisted, related only to her work for the relief of internees).[4]: 64
On the 1921Anglo-Irish Treaty, Carney gaveMichael Collins the benefit of the doubt. She became a courier carrying messages relating to his discussions withSir James Craig, nowPrime Minister of Northern Ireland, and then a member of a monitoring committee set up under the pact that was eventually reached.[4]: 201–203, 208, 219 As theCivil War in the south unfolded, she recoiled from the summary execution of Collin's anti-Treaty former comrades, among themErskine Childers, whom she had known well.[4]: 231 But she was unpersuaded by Collins's nemesis,Éamon de Valera.
To O'Shannon, Carney remarked that it was well that Markievicz died when she did (in 1927) before, victorious in theFree State election of 1932, De Valera could employ her as a figurehead.[40]: 66 n.20 Carney saw hisFianna Fáil regime as neither advancing the equality of women promised in the1916 Proclamation nor theDemocratic Programme of theFirst Dáil that had subordinated private property to "public right and public welfare" (and had included state provision for children and the elderly).[45] Relenting only as she lay dying in her last weeks, Carney refused to accept from Dublin a pension for her part in 1916.[1][46]
In 1920, Carney had attended anIndependent Labour Party convention inGlasgow[4]: 233 and, in 1924 accompanied other ILP members in joining the militantCourt branch of the BLP's successor, theNorthern Ireland Labour Party.[1] The party acknowledged the reality of partition and of aBelfast parliament but without any profession of loyalty. It was an equivocation on the national question—a "pragmatic silence"[47]— that allowed for an uneasy co-operation between republican labour and those who, despite its refusal to organise inNorthern Ireland, looked to theLabour Party in Britain.[43]: 21–22 The branch secretary wasTommy Geehen, a Catholic textile worker, who was to quit the NILP in 1930 for theComintern-sanctionedRevolutionary Workers' Groups.[48][49]
In the NILP, Carney met George McBride. A working-class Protestant, ten years her junior, from theShankill Road, McBride was a formerUlster Volunteer, and war veteran[50] While she had been at the GPO, as aLewis gunner with the36th (Ulster) Division he had been moving up toward the trenches on theSomme.[51][52] From the experience of the battlefield and of German captivity he had emerged as an internationalist and as an atheist.[44]: 4 McBride shared Carney's socialist commitment, but not her continued defence of the Easter Rising (she could "never convince him that the deaths had been worth it")[2]: 260 [4]: 26 or her focus onpartition (as they would anyway be controlled by international finance,the border, in his view, was not the central question).[4]: 29 Facing opposition from both their families, in 1928, they took the ferry toHolyhead inWales and married, in a civil registry, with no relatives present.[51][8]
After her marriage, Carney left her job with the ITGWU. She was unwilling to work in Dublin, her health was poor, and she was caring for her increasingly infirm mother.[53] Anticipating the reaction of his workmates to his marrying a republican, McBride had resigned his job at theMackie engineering works; opened a small leather-good business, and taken a position as aNational Council of Labour Colleges lecturer in Economic History.[2]: 256 The couple got their own house at 3 Whitewell Parade,Newtownabbey, on Belfast's northern outskirts.[4]: 30
In 1932, Carney and McBride were part of theOutdoor Relief Workers Committee.[2]: 261 Its organising efforts contributed to bringing thousands of Protestant and Catholic working people out onto the streets, and after 10 days running street battles with the police, to winning significant increases in welfare payments.[54]: 219–220 The following year, the couple joined theSocialist Party of Northern Ireland (SPNI),[1] formed by those in the Independent Labour Party who refused a British national directive to disaffiliate from the NILP. A mainly Protestant organisation, with around 150 members in the Shankill andNewtownards Road districts of Belfast,[55][56] it includedJack Macgougan, secretary from 1935 onwards, andVictor Halley.[57]
In June 1934, with other party members (and withJack White)[58]: 23–24 they turned up in a contingent of 200 from Belfast at the annualWolfe Tone commemoration atBodenstown. They had been assembled by Victor Halley acting as an organiser for theRepublican Congress,[2]: 263 apopular front initiative of, among others,Anti-Treaty veteransPeadar O'Donnell,Frank Ryan, andGeorge Gilmore.[59][60] On the approach to Tone's graveside, the visitors were blocked by members of TipperaryIRA who seized and ripped their "red" ("Break The Connection with Capitalism") banner.[61][62] 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".[63]
The Congress was unable to achieve left-republican unity. In September, Carney and McBride were delegates to a conference inRathmines,[2]: 264 where, despite denunciations of de Valera's system of labour "arbitration and conciliation" as "practical fascism", theCommunist Party line of accommodatingFianna Fáil in an anti-imperialist "united front" was carried by a narrow majority.[64][58]: 32–33
From the summer of 1936, Carney and McBride worked with other socialists to organise support for therepublican side in theSpanish Civil War.[44]: 10 Again, they found themselves at odds with faith-and-fatherland nationalists. Contesting theDock constituency in 1938, NILP leaderHarry Midgley had his election rallies disrupted by chants of "Remember Spain" and "We wantFranco."[65]
Carney's health deteriorated sharply in the late 1930s.[66] On 21 November 1943, she died in Belfast ofTB, aged 55.[1] After a small funeral at her local parish Church (St Mary's Greencastle),[2]: 31 Carney was buried atMilltown Cemetery in an unmarked grave.[67] A grand-niece has suggested that this was due to her brother Ernest’s continued disapproval of her marriage to McBride.[53]
In 1956, Connolly's biographer, the Marxist historianDesmond Greaves, found McBride "a big lumbering man in his late sixties with 5000 books littered throughout a quite small house" and committed to the memory not only of his wife, but also of Larkin and (though he had considered him a poor strategist)[2]: 239 of Connolly.[68] 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 theloyalist terroristMichael Stone run over his wife's grave during his gun and grenade attack on anIRA funeral.[69] 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 inBangor.[2]: 286–287
Three years before,National Graves Association, Belfast had erected a headstone for Carney which had acknowledged her not only as a "life long republican socialist" but also as McBride's "beloved wife."[8] In 2016 theBelfast and District Trades Union Council did McBride the same favour, erecting a grave marker with representatives from both families attending. A display, telling the story of Carney and McBride, was mounted at Belfast City Hall.[51]
Following a 2012 Equality Impact Assessment that confirmed the grounds of Belfast City Hall were dominated by "white, male, upper class and unionist images,"[70][71] in 2017 Sinn Féin councilors proposed a monument to Carney.[72] 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).[70] Together with another bronze by the same artist, Ralph Sander, of theUnited Irishwoman andabolitionistMary Ann McCracken, the figure of Carney was unveiled in front of the city hall onInternational Women's Day (8 March) 2024. Carney is depicted—typewriter on one side,Webley revolver on the other—in her 1916 Citizen Army uniform.[73]
Played by Eithne Lydon, Winifred Carney appears in the 1966RTÉ drama series on the 1916 Rising,Insurrection. She is a chief protagonist in a 2015 graphic novel, designed with an learning pack on the Easter Rising for secondary schools in Northern Ireland.[74]
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