Birth of Ethna Carbery (Anna Johnston)

Ethna Carbery, born Anna Bella Johnston, was an Irish journalist, writer and poet. She is best known for writing the poem and song “Roddy McCorley”, and the “Song of Ciabhán”; the latter was set to music by Ivor Gurney. 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. Her poetry was collected and published after her death under the pen name Ethna Carbery, adopted following her marriage to the poet Seumas MacManus in 1901.

She was born Anna Bella Johnston on 3 December 1866 in the townland of Kirkinriola, Ballymena, County Antrim, the daughter of Robert Johnston, a timber merchant and a leading member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, and Marjorie (Mage) Magee, who came from County Donegal.

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. He later oversaw the re-organisation of the IRB in the 1880s and had hosted many of the future readers of the Easter Rising in his Antrim Road home in Belfast. 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.”

Birth-year note: the Dictionary of Irish Biography gives 1866; the supplied biographical draft gives 1864. This anniversary follows the dictionary pending review.

Related reading