Description

The True Story of Ireland's Most Unlikely Love

'She never stopped being a republican and he never stopped being a unionist' — Irish News

'George and Winnie didn't overcome their differences; they accepted their difference.' — Irish News

Winnie & George may be a love story. But at its heart are the stories of two remarkable friendships — and a message of hope that still resonates today.

Belfast, 1912. A city divided by religion, politics and war — and yet, against all odds, two lives are about to become intertwined.

Winifred Carney is no ordinary woman. Fiercely intelligent and passionately political, she becomes secretary and trusted confidante to James Connolly himself, standing beside him in the GPO during the Easter Rising, utterly devoted to the cause. George McBride is a Church of Ireland man who marches to a different drum, a Somme veteran who has seen the very worst of war and survived.

When they meet at a Labour Party meeting in 1924, the odds are stacked against them. A Catholic republican and a Protestant unionist. Ten years between them. Both families bitterly opposed. Yet in 1928, they marry anyway — and find in each other a love built not on agreement, but on acceptance.

Their story might have died with them had George not befriended Rita, a nurse from his final years. He entrusted her with a Victorian writing box that had once belonged to his beloved Winnie. Rita passed it to her daughter-in-law, Allison Murphy, with one instruction: remember George and Winnie and how they were still able to live, love and be happy.

This is that book.