Name Linda MacWhinney Role Politician | Died June 5, 1951 Party Fianna Fail | |
Linda Mary MacWhinney (née Kearns; 1 July 1888 – 5 June 1951) was an Irish nurse and Fianna Fáil politician.
Two days after the insurgents seized the Dublin GPO during the Easter Rising in April 1916, Kearns, a nurse, took over an empty building on North Great George's Street. She hung a Red Cross flag above the door and welcomed casualties of the fighting, from both sides of the conflict. However, as she had treated republican volunteers during the uprising, the British Army ordered Kearns to close her unofficial hospital. She did so, with great reluctance.
Born in Cloonagh, Dromard, County Sligo, she was one of eight children born to Thomas and Catherine "Nora" (née Clarke) Kearns. From 1907, she studied and trained to be a nurse. She had not been interested in nationalism or republicanism prior to the Easter Rising and had intended to serve as a nurse in France during the Great War until a chance meeting with Thomas MacDonagh changed her mind and radicalised her.
She realised she had skills that could be useful in times of war. After the Rising she went into private nursing. She was the nurse to the O'Connor Morris family in Tullamore and traveled extensively with them. After Maurice O'Connor Morris's death on 11 February 1916, he left Linda an inheritance of 2,500 pounds. She was able to purchase a car, which would later come in useful during the Anglo-Irish War when she worked as a courier for Michael Collins transporting information and sometimes arms. Her status as a nurse helped her evade detection until she was caught and sentenced to 10 years imprisonment. She served time in a number of Irish prisons before being sent to Walton Prison in Liverpool, where she went on hunger strike. From there she was sent to Mountjoy Prison. In October 1921, she famously escaped from Mountjoy Jail with three other women, Mae Burke, Eileen Keogh, and Eithne Coyle. Her memoir, In Times of Peril, leaves from the Diary of Nurse Linda Kearns from Easter Week 1916 to Mountjoy 1921 was edited by Annie M.P. Smithson in 1922.
In 1924-25, she conducted a successful fundraising tour of Australia on behalf of republican causes.
She was elected to Seanad Éireann on the Industrial and Commercial Panel in April 1938. She was defeated at the Seanad election of August 1938.
Family
She married Wilson Charles MacWhinney but the marriage did not last.