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) and of the Irish Women's Suffrage Society,

Trade unionist

In 1912, she resigned a position with a solicitor in Dungannon, to succeed her friend, Marie Johnson, in the poor and irregularly paid position of secretary to the Irish Textile Workers' Union.The union, a rival to Mary Galway's more cautious Textile Operatives Society, 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.

In June 1913, while claiming that "the ranks of the Irish Textile Workers’ Union are being recruited by hundreds", with Carney, Connolly produced a Manifesto to the Linen Slaves of Belfast (1913) that revealed his frustration as an organiser: [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" (they had struck en masse in 1874, in 1906,and again in 1911 during which the ITWU had been formed), 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".

During the great Dublin lock-out in the autumn of 1913, with her trade union comrades Ellen [Gordon] Grimley and Cathal O'Shannon, Carney raised funds and organised support for the workers and (in a "holiday" scheme devised by Dora Montefiore) 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 being organised by Christabel Pankhurst's emissary from England, Dorothy Evans. The WSPU believed they had had an understanding with the Ulster 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, the nationalists would make no such undertaking. 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".

A result was that Carney joined the WSPU just as its militants launched a campaign of arson attacks against Unionist-associated properties. These included the Ulster Volunteers' centre at Abbeylands House, and culminated in Dorothy Evans creating an uproar in court by demanding to know why James Craig, who was then equipping the Volunteers with German arms, was not appearing on the same weapons and explosives charges.

Carney was not directly involved: 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-based Irish Women's Franchise League disapproved] 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 and Elizabeth McCracken, in refusing Christabel Pankhurst's directive to disband and cease all activity for the duration.

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.