Changes in the Town Hall as the Shackleton Museum develops

I was privileged during the week to have a guided tour of the interior of the future Shackleton Museum. What I saw was very impressive and indicated the quality of workmanship which I am afraid did not appear in the ancient building I was so familiar with over the years. I cannot remember when I first saw the interior of the Town Hall, but it was I believe sometime in the mid-1950s when Paddy Wright, Teddy Kelly and I gained access to an upper floor room, while a dance was in its early stages in the ballroom. Denis Cogan, the former County Architect for Kildare, writing in the Kildare Archaeological Society Journal of 1991, suggested that Athy Town Hall may have been the first of the Palladian style civic style buildings built in Ireland. The original Town Hall was built in the second or third decade of the 18th century. Bishop Pococke on his tour of Ireland in 1752 made reference to the ‘new market house in Athy’. Rocque’s map of Athy prepared for the Earl of Kildare four years after Pococke’s visit to Athy, shows a T shaped building which Denis Cogan believes was an open cross vaulted market house on the ground floor, with a courtroom and assembly rooms overhead. Nicholas Sheaff, Director of the Irish Architectural Archives, in his report of 1984 stated his belief that the square in front of the Town Hall was laid out at the same time as the Town Hall’s construction, with the Town Hall designed as the architectural focus. The style of the building reflected, according to Sheaff, a sophisticated Palladian classicalism on the part of the designer, suggesting that the design came from the offices of Richard Cassels, the leading Irish Palladian architect of the 18th century. The Town Hall has been much altered over the years, with extensions both in front and rear of the original building. The mid-19th century extension to the front of the building was the most important extension and consisted of rubble masonry walls, with tooled limestone string course. In 1913 a further alteration was made to the Town Hall when the earlier extension to the front of the building was raised by a storey, as was the 18th century centre section, making the entire façade three stories high. The much-altered building was again the subject of building work when in 1969 the central part of the ground floor was adopted for use as a fire station. With the building of the new Town Council offices in Rathstewart in 1985 the Town Hall became vacant and fell into a derelict state. Kildare County Council, which had earlier purchased the property from the Duke of Leinster, subsequently restored the building under an AnCO training scheme which was completed in May 1990. One of the oldest elements of the Town Hall is a bell which originally hung from a frame which stood in the roof of the two-storey centre section before it was heightened in the mid-18th century. The bell came from the Church of Ireland Parish Church which stood in the rear square behind the Town Hall before it was demolished following the building of St. Michael’s Church at the top of Offaly Street in 1840. Macra na Feirme, which was established by local men Paddy Kehoe, Stephen Cullinane, Juan Greene, E. Minch and A. Spiers, established its headquarters in the Town Hall room vacated by the Athy Mechanics Institute in 1947. The first library in the town of Athy opened in the Town Hall on 1st December 1927. It was operated by Kildare County Council. A local Library Committee was set up and was intended to comprise the local Parish Priest Canon Mackey, his three curates, Rev. Dunlop of the Church of Ireland and the Reverend Meek of the Presbyterian Church. The six clerics and its fellow committee members, five local Urban District Councillors and the Town Clarke, James Lawler who acted as the library secretary, made up the Committee By the time I became aware of the local building amongst which I played on a daily basis, the Town Hall’s ground floor was still used as a market place. To the rear of the building was a weighing scales, managed by Jim Dempsey who lived in Offaly Street. His offices were still at use until the Fire Brigade moved into the ground floor of the Town Hall There were many uses of the Town Hall over the centuries, including the location of the Free Masons Club in the building over many decades. The Parish School, operated by the Church of Ireland, was reported in 1824 to have 157 pupils on its roll, with an average attendance of 50 boys and 35 girls. Located in the Town Hall the headmaster of the school was James Hunter and the headmistress Lydia Hunter. In February 1917 Athy Hibernian Players put on a play in the Town Hall and the subsequent press reports give the names of those involved whom it is said stood to attention for the singing of ‘A Nation Once Again’. Those named were the first publicly identified Nationalist sympathisers in Athy and many of them figured prominently in the local Sinn Fein Club which was formed in June 1917. On 19th July 1917 Athy’s newly established Sinn Fein Club organised a concert in the Town Hall in aid of the families of those killed in the Easter Rising. The audience was addressed by Arthur Griffith, the founder of Sinn Fein. Another famous visitor to the Town Hall was Charles Stewart Parnell who arrived in Athy in 1880 to chair the parliamentary nomination for the upcoming election. James Leahy, a farmer from Ardscull and one time Chairman of Athy Town Commissioners, was nominated despite Parnell’s early objection as he felt that Leahy: ‘this fat man will be of no use, he will fall asleep in the House’. Having cross examined the prospective candidate, Parnell was apparently satisfied and allowed the nomination to go ahead. Leahy was to have a constant if unspectacular presence in the House of Commons until 1895. The story of Athy’s Town Hall tells us more of the history of the organisations and the people who used the Town Hall over the years. Their story will hopefully be told on another day, but in the meantime we welcome the adoption of the Town Hall for use exclusively as a Shackleton Museum.

Athy's Town Hall and its redevelopment as Shackleton Museum

The ongoing redevelopment of Athy’s Town Hall seems to have puzzled some local residents who were unaware of the plans for the Shackleton Museum. This lack of knowledge probably owes much to the ever increasing lack of support for print journalism as the story of the museum has featured several times over the years in the local newspapers. Athy’s Town Hall like Whites Castle is an iconic building whose importance as part of the town’s built heritage has not always been appreciated. The Nationalist newspaper reported on the 7th November 1980 that “Athy Urban District Council have passed a motion to demolish the building and replace it with a modern structure”. This had followed the Council members consideration some years earlier of a motion to demolish the Town Hall so as to provide extra car parking facilities in the town centre. Happily, the building which was admittedly in a sad state of semi dereliction at that time was saved following the intervention of the local branch of An Taisce. A subsequent Community Employment Scheme helped restore the building which continued to be used for a time as the town’s Council offices, the local Fire Brigade station and later still as the town library. The local Museum Society, which was founded in 1983, was allowed to occupy in or about 1985 what was once the caretaker’s living quarters in the Town Hall. With the subsequent departure of the Fire Station to newly built facilities at Woodstock Street, the Museum Society took over the entire ground floor of the Town Hall. Further expansion of the Museum then designated as a Heritage Centre followed with the transfer of the Town Library to the magnificent former Dominican Church. The growing national and international success of the Shackleton Autumn School organised by volunteers working from the Heritage Centre sparked the idea of a Museum dedicated to one of the world’s most famous polar explorers Ernest Shackleton who was born in nearby Kilkea. The work which is now being undertaken at the Town Hall is the final stage of several years of planning to give the town of Athy a Museum of national importance. Building work which will last until mid-2025 will give us quite an extraordinary architectural addition to the town’s built heritage. Athy Museum Society first formed in 1983 and which later established Athy Heritage Company Limited to operate the Heritage Centre will be soon dissolved. It is intended to call a public meeting open to all persons interested in Athy’s history and local history generally to formalise the setting up of Athy’s History Society. Details of that meeting, venue and the date will be published shortly. The current members of the Board of Directors of Athy Heritage Company Limited, all of whom are volunteers will, with two exceptions, resign from the Board in the very near future. The new Board of Directors will be nominated by Kildare County Council and thereafter the Shackleton Museum will be effectively operated subject to the control of the County’s Local Authority. There have been many persons who over the years volunteered their time and expertise to the running of the original Museum and the Heritage Centre. It would perhaps be invidious to name names for fear of leaving out anyone who contributed at any time over the last forty years to the museum’s success. However, a heartfelt thanks must go to everybody in Athy and elsewhere who have made a contribution to the ongoing success of the Heritage Centre/Shackleton Museum and the Shackleton Autumn School. With the resignation of all but two of the current Board of Directors, I too will be stepping down as Chairman of the Board. It has taken forty years to get the museum story to this point almost as long as it took to get the outer relief road which opened last year. Writing of one iconic building in our town I have to acknowledge that the most important building in Athy, having regard to its links with past historical events and its location in the heart of the town, is Whites Castle. While it continues in private ownership there is no indication that there are plans in place to protect and conserve the building structure. Having regard to its current condition concern must be expressed at the possibility of losing Athy’s most widely known and distinctive building. I am reminded of the comments made by the Kildare County Council C.E.O. at the recent opening of the new library in Naas when she described the Naas Town Hall as ‘an iconic building at the heart of Naas being given a new use while preserving its history and heritage.’ If there is any other building in the entire county of Kildare fitting that description it is surely Athy’s Whites Castle. I have sought over many years to interest the former Athy Town Council and Kildare County Council in acquiring Whites Castle. Placing it in public ownership offers the best possibility of conserving the building and allowing it to be developed and used for the benefit of the public. Now that local authorities have greater responsibility than ever before for matters of culture and heritage, surely Kildare County Council should now seriously consider what it can do to ensure the future of the 600-year-old building at the heart of our town. The history lecture series in the Community Arts Centre, Woodstock Street recommences on Tuesday, 13th February at 8.00 p.m. with a lecture by Adrian Kane whose book on Trade Unions was recently published. Adrian, who is an officer with S.I.P.T.U., is a native of Athy and has been based and working in Cork for a number of years. His father Paddy was an active community worker during his lifetime here in Athy and one of the founding members of Athy Credit Union. Admission is free to what promises to be a stimulating evening.

Photos Tuesday Market / Town Hall

The two photographs I have chosen for this week reflect the huge changes which have taken place in Athy over the last ten years or so.  The Tuesday market has been a regular weekly occurrence in Athy ever since Henry VIII of England granted a Charter to the town in 1515.  The second hand clothes market was an important and an essential facility for those families caught in the throes of economic deprivation.  The Town Hall shown in the second photograph reflected the poverty of the town, its rundown state belyies its status as the principle building in Athy

Athy's Town Hall

A group of 45 national and regional tourist guides arrived in Athy on Thursday to visit the local Heritage Centre and I took the opportunity of briefly outlining the town’s history to them.  Their interest in the Town Hall, that monumental public building dividing the town squares, was a pleasant surprise and made me appreciate yet again the public support which saved the building from destruction in the early 1970s. 

Denis Cogan, the former county architect for Kildare, writing in the Kildare Archaeological Society Journal of 1991 suggested that Athy’s Town Hall may have been the first of the Palladian style civic buildings to be built in Ireland.  The original Town Hall was built in the third or fourth decade of the 18^th century.  Bishop Pococke on his tour of Ireland in 1752 made reference to the ‘new market house in Athy’, which reference would tend to support the suggested building period.

Rocques map of Athy, prepared for the Duke of Leinster four years after Pococke’s visit to the town, shows a T shaped building which Denis Cogan believes was an open cross vaulted market house on the ground floor, with a Courtroom and assembly rooms overhead.

Nicholas Sheaff, Director of the Irish Architectural Archives, prepared a brief architectural history of the Town Hall in 1984.  In his report he stated his belief that the square in front of the Town Hall was in all likelihood laid out at the same time as its construction, with the Town Hall designed as the architectural focus.  The style of the building reflected, according to Sheaff, a sophisticated Palladian classicism on the part of the designer suggesting the design came from the offices of Richard Castle or Cassels, the leading Irish Palladian architect of the early 18^th century.

The Town Hall has been much altered over the years, with extension both to the front and rear of the original building.  The mid 19^th century extension to the front of the building was the most important and consisted of rubble masonary walls with tooled limestone stringcourse.  It was then that the two stone carved plaques representing Justice intertwined with the symbols of Ireland and England were inserted in the walls of the Town Hall.  Cogan believes that this extension was made to improve the existing Courtroom facilities.

I had always believed that the side room on the first floor of the west side of the building where the wooden frieze and canopy with the wall niche was once located indicated the original Courtroom, but Sheaff thought otherwise.  He claimed that the canopy was more likely than not installed by the local freemasons who probably held their meetings in that room.

In 1913 further alterations were made to the Town Hall when the earlier extensions to the front of the building were raised by a story, as was the 18^th century centre section, making the entire facade three stories high.

The much altered building was again the subject of building work when in 1969 the central part of the ground floor was adopted for use as a fire station.  With the building of the new Town Council offices at Rathstewart in 1985 the Town Hall became vacant and fell into a derelict state.  Kildare County Council, which had earlier purchased the property from the Duke of Leinster, subsequently restored the building under an Anco Training Scheme which was completed in May 1990.

The oldest element of the Town Hall is the bell which was originally hung from a frame which stood on the roof of the two storey centre section before it was heightened in the mid 18^th century.  The bell came from the Church of England Parish Church which stood in the rear square behind the Town Hall before it was demolished following the building of St. Michael’s Church at the top of Offaly Street in 1840.  The bell is marked with the date 1682.

The Building which in its time has housed a market place, a Courthouse, the Freemasons meeting place, assembly rooms, a ballroom cum theatre, a clothes factory, a fire station, Urban Council offices and various caretakers families is now home to Athy’s public library and the town’s Heritage Centre.