Unionists slammed by TUV councillor for appearing to show respect to Belfast statue of a gun-holding Irish republican

Ron McDowell, who is the only TUV councillor in Belfast, spoke about the newly unveiled statue to Winifred Carney, who took part in the 1916 Easter Rising and who has been honoured with the monument, at the same time as a statue to Mary Ann McCracken was unveiled.

Speaking to Saturday’s TUV conference in Kells, Co Antrim, Mr McDowell said: “When the statue of Winifred Carney was unveiled carrying a gun, and wearing an IRA uniform in the 1916 terrorist uprising, the unionists – well, the unionists went and got their photographs taken with the statue for International Women's Day.”

More two TUV delegates could be heard shouting “shame on them”, and other voices echoed this by shouting “shame”.

To applause and cries of “hear, hear,” Mr McDowell continued: “Well, there is one voice in city hall who has no part in these things.”

The DUP group leader in Belfast Sarah Bunting issued a post on the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, on March 8 with four photographs relating to the statues. She wrote: “We never made it for the official event due to work commitments but this afternoon some of the women from the South Belfast DUP association visited Belfast City Hall to see the new statues unveiled for #InternationalWomensDay2024”

One of the photographs shows Ms Bunting and two other women alongside the statue to Ms McCracken, and another shows the statue of Ms Carney, but with no people standing by it. A further image is of a description of Ms McCracken and Ms Carney, the latter explaining her role in the Easter Rising and has other details about her life.

Mr McDowell did not in his speech name the unionists to whom he was referring.

Click here to read the News Letter editor Ben Lowry’s article on the Carney statue, and how he fears that it is the beginning of a bid to get statues to republican terrorists into public spaces in Northern Ireland.

The News Letter reporter Adam Kula tried last week to find out how the statue with the gun got approved and how unionists voted on it – click here to read his story. He discovered that the matter of the statues had been passed back-and-forth between various council groups for several years, and the minutes of meetings often record only the overall outcome of a vote, not how each party or each councillor voted. The first reference the News Letter could find to Winifred Carney is in 2017, in the minutes of a meeting of the council's Historic Working Group, when the then-councillor Deirdre Hargey (later the Sinn Fein communities minister) raised the issue of a statute honouring her.

It appears that the plan for both statutes got approval from the Strategic Policy and Resources Committee on May 21, 2021, and that this was ratified in the next full council meeting (though its not clear if it was put to a vote or just waved through).

Deputy chair of the committee at the time is the current DUP group leader, Sarah Bunting. Mr Kula could not reach Ms Bunting on Friday. MLA Brian Kingston, then a DUP councillor on the same committee, was asked by this newspaper how he voted on it, but he insisted the News Letter must address all enquiries about council business to the current group leader, Ms Bunting.