Mary Galway (1864 – 26 September 1928), was an Irish trade unionist and suffragist. She was President of the Textile Operatives Society and she and another woman were exceptionally sent to national conference fifteen years before another woman was chosen.

Life

Mary Galway was born in 1864 near Moira in

County Down County Down () is one of the six counties of Northern Ireland, one of the nine counties of Ulster and one of the traditional thirty-two counties of Ireland. It covers an area of and has a population of 531,665. It borders County Antrim to the ...

. She was one of at least five girls born to the family. They moved to

Belfast Belfast ( , ; from ga, Béal Feirste , meaning 'mouth of the sand-bank ford') is the capital and largest city of Northern Ireland, standing on the banks of the River Lagan on the east coast. It is the 12th-largest city in the United Kingdo ...

while she was young where her family's income was dependent on the linen weaving industry. Galway started working when she was 11 years old and joined the Textile Operatives Society of Ireland. By 1898 she was elected to the executive of Belfast Trades Council and that year she represented them at the fifth annual Irish Trades Union Congress along with Lizzie Bruce. It was fifteen years before another society sent women as delegates to the congress. By 1907 Galway was president of the society and was the first woman on the Irish Trades Union Congress National Executive. Galway became the union's first woman Vice-President in 1910. Throughout she used her voice to call for women's equality and suffrage urging women to ‘agitate until they got the franchise and representation in Parliament.’ She was also a member of the Central Committee for Women’s Employment for Ulster. Galway was a regular contributor to the discussion in

The Irish Citizen ''The Irish Citizen'' was founded in 1912 as the newspaper by the Irish Women's Franchise League. Its first editors were Francis Sheehy-Skeffington the writer, pacifist and suffragist, and James Cousins, James H. Cousins'The "Irish Citizen", 1912 ...

around wages, exploitation, class and workers’ rights. Galway testified to parliament on a number of worker issues and was instrumental in eliminating the concept of children working half time in school and half time in work and in shortening the working week to forty-eight hours. Before 1900 the union had had 1,000 members. By 1918 it had over 10,000. James Connolly and Galway clashed when he set up what she felt was a competing union but she continued to achieve significant goals for her members and to set up further branches around the country.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Galway, Mary 1864 births 1928 deaths Irish suffragists Irish women's rights activists Trade unionists from County Down People from Moira, County Down