In Belfast in the late 1890s, with Alice Milligan she produced The Shan Van Vocht, a nationalist monthly of literature, history and comment that gained a wide circulation in Ireland and in the Irish diaspora.

[2] Born in 1839 her father had grown up hearing stories from the last veteran United Irishmen who had fought at the Battle of Antrim and personally knew a number of Young Irelanders from the 1840s before himself becoming involved in the 1867 Fenian rising.

Carbery's husband, the poet and folklorist Seumus MacManus, called Robert Johnston the "…connecting link that kept the spirit of freedom alive throughout more than a century.

[6] Milligan resigned in solidarity and, working out of the offices of Robert-Johnston's timber yard, they launched their own independent monthly The Shan Van Vocht, producing forty issues.

[11] At the fiftieth anniversary of her death, a public address was given by Sinead de Valera in which she stated that "Among women poets Ethna Carbery would always hold the foremost place and, even though her life was short, it was full of devotion and idealism" (Irish Press 2/4/1952).