Maria Winifred "Winnie" Carney (4 December 1887 – 21 November 1943), was an Irish republican, a participant in the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin, and in Belfast—as a trade union secretary, women's suffragist, and socialist party member—a lifelong social and political activist.

[4]: 11 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)[12] for their children sheltered by sympathetic families in Belfast.

[19] With the other activists, Carney had transferred her loyalty to the Belfast branch of the direct-action Women's Social and Political Union[2]: 84–85  being organised by Christabel Pankhurst's emissary from England, Dorothy Evans.

[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".

[24]: 141  But it is certain that, following Britain's declaration of war on Germany in August 1914, she would have supported Margaret McCoubrey[24]: 144  and Elizabeth 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.

Having set out with the initial garrison party from Liberty Hall on Easter Monday, Carney (armed with a typewriter and a Webley revolver) was the first woman during the Rising to enter the General Post Office.

[29][30] 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.

[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.

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.

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)[38] in the convicted prison population.

[37][39] Supported by her friends Marie Johnson and Alice Milligan,[3] in the December 1918 United Kingdom general election Carney stood for Sinn Féin in Belfast Victoria—with Markievicz in Dublin, one of only two women endorsed by the republican party.

Among the "seditious papers" seized was correspondence with Michael Collins and other leading republicans, a membership card for the Socialist Party of Ireland, and a collection of political pamphlets.

She became a courier carrying messages relating to his discussions with Sir James Craig, now Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, and then a member of a monitoring committee set up under the pact that was eventually reached.

[43]: 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 on partition (as they would anyway be controlled by international finance, the border, in his view, was not the central question).

[52] 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.

A mainly Protestant organisation, with around 150 members in the Shankill and Newtownards Road districts of Belfast,[54][55] it included Jack Macgougan, secretary from 1935 onwards, and Victor Halley.

They had been assembled by Victor Halley acting as an organiser for the Republican Congress,[2]: 263  a popular front initiative of, among others, Anti-Treaty veterans Peadar O'Donnell, Frank Ryan, and George Gilmore.

In September, Carney and McBride were delegates to a conference in Rathmines,[2]: 264  where, despite denunciations of de Valera's system of labour "arbitration and conciliation" as "practical fascism", the Communist Party line of accommodating Fianna Fáil in an anti-imperialist "united front" was carried by a narrow majority.

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.

[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.

[50] Following a 2012 Equality Impact Assessment that confirmed the grounds of Belfast City Hall were dominated by "white, male, upper class and unionist images,"[69][70] in 2017 Sinn Féin councilors proposed a monument to Carney.

[71] 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).

[69] 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.