Poles apart: The Irish at the ends of the Earth this Christmas

A polar research ship carries two Irish men carrying out vital work in the Antarctic, while a reindeer expert from Dublin lives in the ‘official’ home town of Santa Claus. All will be spending Christmas far away from home, writes Sorcha Crowley

Captain Matt Neill at a King Penguin colony on Salisbury Plain, South Georgia. "There’s half a million King penguins there," he says.

The best part of Captain Matt Neill’s job is, by his own admission, the bit I suspect many of us would love a go at: smashing a great big ship through a vast expanse of Christmas cake sea-ice, in the same frozen ocean that crushed Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton’s Endurance in 1915, happy in the knowledge that a century on, your 10,000 tonne reinforced hull gives you far better odds of survival than Shackleton ever had. 

As job skills go, it’s niche. Not to tempt fate, but the £200m, 129m-long superstructure Capt. Neill commands is the most advanced polar research ship in the world, sensibly named after the naturalist Sir David Attenborough, (don’t mention the public online poll which voted for it to be called Boaty McBoatface in 2016).