Ernest Shackleton was Irish

I have been marvelling at the restoration works being carried out by Kildare County Council on the Town Hall in Emily Square, Athy. For much of my life it has been a dark grey presence in the centre of Town. I have been pleasantly surprised by the lightness of colour of its stonework since it was cleaned and repointed over the last number of months. Is brings a lightness and airiness to the square which I could not have foreseen and the re-ordering of Emily Square over the next twelve months will give Athy a civic space to be proud of. When the Museum re-opens at the end of next summer it will be a draw for international visitors. I was reminded of this when two stalwarts of the Shackleton Museum, Kevin Kenny of Naas and Seamus Taaffe of this town were invited to lecture at the Royal Geographical Society in London this month. The occasion was the Shackleton 150th Anniversary conference. Kevin Kenny delivered the opening address on the evening of Friday, 17th May where he spoke to a rapt audience with a whistlestop tour of the life of Shackleton. The weekend was punctuated by a variety of interesting talks on all matters relating to Shackleton Antarctic Experience. The next contribution from Athy was from Seamus Taaffe who gave a lecture titled ‘Shackleton, the Irish perspective’. This was a useful corrective to the narrative often foisted on visitors that Shackleton was British or English. It often forgotten that the Shackleton family have been established in the South Kildare area since the early 18th Century. The first of the number to arrive here was Abraham Shackleton who came from Yorkshire as a private tutor in 1725. Such was his successes in education that he established his own school in the Quaker Village of Ballytore in 1726. Among its pupils was the renowned Parliamentarian Edmund Burke remembered for his writing and particularly for his pamphlet “Reflections of the Revolution of France”. Napper Tandy, the revolutionary founder of the United Irishman was also a pupil. It was he who inspired the famous ballad “The Wearing of the Green” and many of us will recall the wonderful rendition of that self same ballad by Jack L, of this town, at the unveiling of the Shackleton statute in Athy on the 31st August 2016. The significance of that date being that it marked the centenary to the day of the rescue of Shackleton’s men from Elephant Island where they had been stranded for many months after abandoning their ship Endurance on the Ice. While Shackleton himself would spend the first ten years of his life in Ireland, the first four years were spent in Kilkea area which surely had a formative influence on him. His Irish identity was important to him and his siblings to the point that his youngest sister Gladys who was born in London was often teased by the rest of the family as being a ‘Sassenach’ as the rest of them were all Irish born. When Shackleton rose to worldwide prominence in the advent of his expedition to the Antarctica in 1909, his Irishness was to the forefront in the ensuing public acclaim. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of the Sherlock Home stories, whose mother was Irish, reflected on the tension between Ireland and the United Kingdom at that time. In his speech in 1909 he stated “Shackleton is an Irishman. As a fellow Irishman, I take pride in that thought. These are times when antagonism between the Islands, may even cause you to have hard thoughts on the gallant race who are our neighbours. When such a time comes, think of what you have on the other side. Think of that flag flapping yonder on the snowfield planted there by an Irishman.” It is interesting to note that whenever Shackleton was obliged to register his details as a crew member on a sailing ship or otherwise, he always recorded his nationality as Irish. In 1911 when he was residing in London, in completing the Census Form, he described his nationality as ‘Irish’ and his place of birth as ‘Athy, Co, Kildare, Ireland’. Their Irish heritage remained important to Shackleton’s siblings and at different stages of their lives, they all made their way back to Ireland. His sister Helen spent three months in Ireland in the Summer of 1908 visiting some of her old haunts in the Kilkea/Moone area. Shackleton’s eldest sister Kathleen also returned to Ireland in 1925 for a number of months where she toured the country and painted the portraits of many of the most significant members of Irish society including the poet W.B. Yeats and the President Douglas Hyde. Eleanor Hope Shackleton spent much of her life nursing in Canada and the UK and also served in the Great War in Salonica and France. She visited Ireland after her retirement as a nurse at the age of 78, in 1959. She was last of the Shackleton’s to return to Athy where she visited Kilkea House where she had been born. She would die a year later