Irish Argentina: Ireland’s Forgotten Colonists
This article has been syndicated with the permission of the University of Notre Dame publication Eriugena Review.
The Irish are a people famous for their emigration. Stories of starving Irish men and women fleeing in desperation from the horrors of the Great Famine of the 1840s and seeking another chance at life overseas are deeply ingrained in the Irish psyche, both at home and abroad. Close to 2 million Irish people emigrated in the 1840s and 1850’s. Most went to England or the United States. Such was the scale of nineteenth century Emigration that by 1891, nearly 40% of all living Irish who were born in Ireland were living outside their native homeland.
Beyond the Anglosphere countries, one now forgotten destination for nineteenth century Irish emigrants was Argentina. While this migration was accelerated by the Great Famine, movement to Argentina had begun in the years before. The earliest record of Irishmen in South America are Juan and Tomás Farrel, two brothers who were part of an expedition led by the Spanish conquistador Pedro de Mendoza. This expedition would result in the founding of the city of Buenos Aires, today the capital of Argentina. There are further examples of Irishmen here in this era but the numbers are trivial compared to what would follow in the 1800s.
The Early 1800s
The early Irish emigrants to Argentina in the 1800s were laborers, merchants, artisans and mercenaries, mainly based in the city of Buenos Aires. Many women worked as domestic servants, as was common for female Irish immigrants wherever they went. The availability of land grants drew new Irish settlers beyond the city, to colonise and develop the lush but unpopulated Argentine “pampas” (agricultural flatlands), with the chance of becoming a wealthy landowner and member of the landed Gentry being enticing to ambitious young men with little prospects.
The most famous of the Irish Argentines from the early 1800s is William Brown, a Mayo-born Catholic who served in the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars, after being press-ganged into service (this impressment of American sailors by Britain was one of the main causes of the War of 1812). In 1809, he moved to Argentina to work as a merchant. Brown would go on to become a leading figure in Argentina’s War of Independence in the 1810s.
He is now famous in the country as the "father of the Argentine Navy," and is regarded as one of Argentina's national heroes, with more than 1,200 streets named after him. His story mirrors that of Bernardo O’Higgins, one of the main leaders in Chile’s War of Independence. Leading Spanish American colonies to independence appears to have been something of a habit of Irishmen in this era. Another Irish merchant turned soldier, John Thomond O'Brien, who was born in Wicklow, was tasked by the Argentinian government to encourage more Irish settlers to migrate to Buenos Aires, which he did.
The Irish who left for Argentina before the Famine were, like those who went elsewhere, attracted by the prospect of a better life and better economic and social conditions. This is understandable given the dire poverty and living conditions which were the norm for the pre-famine Irish.
The average life expectancy of the early nineteenth-century Irish living in Ireland was 19 years, while African Slaves living in the contemporary United States had a life expectancy of 36 years. American slaves lived in houses that were often larger than the unventilated huts that the Irish lived in, and slept on mattresses, while most Irish slept on piles of straw. American slaves also ate a wider variety of foods, their diets including low-grades of meat, while the Irishman’s diet consisted of potatoes and sometimes fish, and meat was not seen from one year to the next.[1]
Irish emigrants to Argentina were typically not from the very bottom of Irish Society, and mainly came from counties Westmeath, Longford, Offaly, and Wexford. Many men were driven by the fact that they were the non-inheriting sons in a Catholic farming family, with emigration more enticing to them than a career in the Priesthood or the British Army, the other main options for social advancements in this era for these men.
The decision to migrate to Argentina vs. North America or Britain had different incentives. Passage to the United States and Canada was typically less costly than to Argentina, however, laborers who could not afford to pay for their passage to Argentina would have been financially assisted by sheep farmers who were looking for skilled workers from Ireland.
Argentina was a Catholic country, while, in North America, there remained a strong feeling of estrangement and animosity toward Catholicism in certain sections of the two countries. However, there remained strong cultural barriers in Argentina, which was a Spanish-speaking country with a much more foreign culture to the Irish, while Britain and North America were English-speaking countries, and with a culture that the Irish were more familiar with and found easier to assimilate into.
In Argentina, the Irish were regarded as “Ingleses" which translates as “English," though in this context, refers to “British” in general. This perception of the Irish as British gave them the advantage of being highly sought after for work by the local business class, who regarded them as hard and reliable workers. This being the era of Pax Britannica, the British Empire was at its most dominant, and this association added to appeal, with the Irish settlers themselves encouraging it. The native Argentine elite and government desired to cultivate a new upper class based on Europeans, as they associated Europeans with the highest levels of civilization, which Argentina wished to join. For these reasons, the Irish were particularly sought after to re-settle in Argentina.
The initial settlers who left the city survived in very harsh conditions, as any colonist settling new land does, with the Irish working as shepherds on a share-cropping basis with the local sheep owners. These settlements eventually grew into more established and prosperous farms. Settlers who came over initially as renters, would eventually be able to purchase their own land and move up the economic and social ladder. Sheep farming was a profitable venture in the mid-to-late 1800s, and the Irish prospered as international demand for wool and sheep increased.
Life in the Irish Settlements
These Irish settlers formed close communities, with strong ethnic ties. By the mid-nineteenth century, Irish networks had been gradually established by landowners, merchants and priests, which assisted them in hiring family members, friends and neighbours from Ireland to help them on their farms. The Catholic Church, the central feature of Irish life at home and abroad, played a crucial role in this. In other countries to which the Irish emigrated, the Church assisted with social development and assimilation to higher standards of education and behavior.
But in Argentina, Catholic organizations wanted to keep the Irish as a separate community, fearing that assimilation with the surrounding culture and people would lead to worsening social standards, and cultural degradation, even though their Argentine neighbours were also Catholic. Newly-arrived Irish immigrants were met at the dock, the men were connected with Irish employers to find work with fellow Irishmen. The women were connected with established Irish immigrants who had already settled earlier, and the children of these marriages were educated in English-speaking Irish Catholic schools.
These communities established ethnic enclaves where the people had Irish names, spoke and read in English to one another (as opposed to Spanish). The newspapers they read were printed in English, bringing news from the home country, with regular news from the particular counties from which the Irish came. The strong homogeneity and cultural attachment of these communities meant fourth-generation Irish immigrants living there still maintained strong Irish accents and linguistic conventions found back in Ireland.
Notable Figures in Irish Re-settlement
Central to this Irish settlement and community formation was a Galway-born Dominican Priest named Anthony Dominic Fahy. After being appointed by the Archbishop of Dublin to the Irish chaplaincy in Buenos Aires in 1843, he quickly became the de-facto leader of the growing Irish community in Argentina. In this, he served a wide range of roles from Priest, Consul, Interpreter, Employment Agent and Matchmaker, among others. During the Irish Famine, Fr. Fahy raised £411 in Famine Relief (to put this figure into context, Queen Victoria donated £2,000, The Pope donated £213, and US President James K. Polk donated $50). Throughout his time in Argentina, Fr Fahy was responsible for the resettlement of some 60,000 Irish men and women to Argentina.
Fr. Fahy established the Irish Catholic Church in Argentina as a separate entity from the Argentine Church, which was an important step in the development of this as a unique, separate community. He worked to ensure the continued migration of female Irish emigrants to Argentina, as there was a shortage of women in the new colonies (something that is common to most new colonies throughout history). In his endeavors, he was assisted by Thomas Armstrong, a merchant and family friend, who dealt with the business community and government.
The high levels of trust in the Irish community can be seen in Fr Fahy’s assistance with the Irish in business, with Fahy buying properties in his own name and holding them in trust, which would protect his people from being exploited by dishonest traders in a foreign land. The arrangement also resulted in savings on taxes for the Irish. Because Fr. Fahy owned so much property on behalf of his parishioners, on paper he was one of the country’s wealthiest people. The capital from these dealings was lodged at the bank of Thomas Armstrong, who could then invest in industries and business opportunities that would benefit the Irish community.
Fahy and Armstrong continued this practice for roughly thirty years, using surplus funds to finance new Irish settlers. These efforts would allow new Irish settlers to get an opportunity they otherwise would not have and move up the economic ladder and helped many establish themselves as landowners. After Fahy’s death in 1871, and Armstrong’s in 1875, this practice was not able to be continued. With this option no longer available, and most of the land already taken up by previous settlers, new arrivals would go on to become mostly laborers instead.
Another figure who played an important role in Irish settlement was Eduardo Casey, who was born in Argentina to Irish parents in 1847, at the height of the Irish Famine. Casey is an example of an Irishman who would go on to become a wealthy landowner and businessman, eventually purchasing a large area of land and founding the city of Venado Tuerto, which had recently been taken from control by Native Americans, whom the Irish regarded as savages. He also assisted in the founding and funding of the city of Pigüé.
Casey helped populate the agriculturally barren provinces of Curumalal and Venado Tuerto, bringing Irish settlers to Argentina to work for him. The son of two Irish Catholics from Westmeath, he would himself marry an Irish Catholic, as was the norm. To the Irish, he was known to be generous, and funded the construction of new Catholic Churches, and cheap houses for poor workers. Tragically, after a series of financial disasters, he died of suicide in 1906.
The Irish experience in Argentina contrasted in several ways with that of the Irish who went elsewhere, to Canada, the United States and Britain. The availability of so much prosperous land, and the social networks and opportunities that allowed many struggling Irishmen to make a start, saw the formation of their own middle class and elite in the region. Sheep farming was a profitable business in the middle of the nineteenth century. The Irish were well-suited to a rural way of life, as that is what most of them had known back home in Ireland.
This was in contrast to the Irish who arrived in Britain, or the United States, where they formed a new unskilled urban proletariat, working in conditions much harsher than those on the Argentine pampas. They settled mainly in cities but continued to live a way of life more suited to the rural world from whence they came. Many continued to keep pigs or fowl, and this and other such practices in an urban environment (often slums) meant that disease affected Irish neighborhoods particularly hard.
In the United States, the Irish would work as laborers, often in the least skilled, lowest paid and most dangerous occupations. This reached such extremes as American slave-owners hiring Irish laborers to do work considered too dangerous for their slaves. Counter-intuitively, due to the slave being the property of the owner, this placed a greater incentive on the owner not to use them for the most dangerous work that could be done by expendable low-paid workers, in this case, the Irish. The nineteenth century journalist and social critic Frederick Law Olmsted wrote of this racial division of labour with the example of a river boat in Alabama, where he was told: “The [black slaves] are worth too much to be risked here; if the Paddies are knocked overboard, or get their backs broke, nobody loses anything!”[3]
The Dresden Affair and Declining Numbers
Irish workers continued to be in high demand by the Argentinian government through the late 1800s, but in 1889, an event known as the Dresden Affair occurred that would mark a fatal turning point in Irish migration to Argentina. A steamship called the City of Dresden had picked up 1,774 passengers from several Irish cities, the most ever in a single voyage during the nineteenth century. This was the result of a deceitful immigration scheme by 2 government agents Buckley O’Meara and John S. Dillon, (Dillon was the brother of Patrick Dillon, founder of The Southern Cross newspaper, and current leader of the Irish in Argentina). As the supply of Irish migrants was decreasing, the agents had enticed many onboard from the poorest portions of Irish society, on the promise that any criminal charges against them dropped if they would emigrate.
Many died due to poor conditions on board or once they arrived in Buenos Aires. On arrival, the passengers were left abandoned by the agents. They were left on the streets with no food or water and their luggage, which had been sent ahead, was lost. Children who had been separated from their parents were left to roam the streets as urchins. Roughly 700 of the passengers were taken to Bahía Blanca to establish the Irish Colony of Napostá, which was a complete failure, as it was soon realized that the coastal area was one of the few regions of the country that was unfavorable to agriculture.
The vast majority of these immigrants either died or did not stay in the country, and struggled to return to Ireland or re-migrated to the United States and elsewhere. This event sparked a public outcry from both press, church and governments, in Ireland and in Argentina. The Archbishop of Cashel, Thomas Croke wrote: "I most solemnly conjure my poorer countrymen, as they value their happiness hereafter, never to set foot on the Argentine Republic however tempted to do so they may be by offers of a passage or an assurance of comfortable homes.".
Afterwards, the Argentine government ceased actively recruiting Irish settlers. After 1889, any Irish arriving were coming of their own volition, in much smaller numbers, and tended to be better educated than average. This event marked a turning point where migration significantly declined, and would never recover.
Into the Twentieth Century
Despite the Dresden Affair beginning a terminal decline in Irish migration, and with it, the cultural distinctiveness of the Irish in Argentina, this did not mean the Irish community ceased to exist immediately. Hurling clubs became established in the last years of the 1800s, becoming actively promoted by the author and journalist William Bulfin, who helped found and was a major patron of the Argentine Hurling Club in 1900. Bulfin at the time was editor of the Southern Cross newspaper, which was founded in 1875 by the Galway-born priest Fr. Patrick Dillon (as of 2023, this newspaper is still in print). As editor of the Southern Cross, Bulfin had enormous influence over the Irish community, which meant the rapid growth of Hurling throughout their neighborhoods and settlements.
William Bulfin was born in Ireland originally and attended a national school in Cloghan, where he was taught by the future Easter Rising leader Thomas MacDonagh. As a man, he maintained a friendship with Arthur Griffith and The O'Rahilly, among others. He lent his support to the establishment of Sinn Féin, and helped finance Padraig Pearse's St. Enda's School which opened in 1908. In 1902 he wrote Rambles In Eirinn, an account of his travels around Ireland by bicycle on his first return, which received much praise. He returned to Ireland again in 1910 and died a month later.
His son Eamon Bulfin studied at St. Enda’s under Pearse and was a keen GAA and Hurling player, winning the Fitzgibbon Cup while studying at University College Dublin. He would go on to participate in the Easter Rising, serving again under his former schoolteacher Pearse. During the Rising, Bulfin was the one to raise the “Irish Republic” flag atop the GPO, the flag given to him by James Connelly.
After the Rising, he was sentenced to death by British military court martial, but due to the fact he was an Argentine citizen born abroad, he was instead deported back to Argentina. During the first Dáil, Eamon de Valéra appointed him the official representative to Argentina. Bulfin was elected in 1920 in his absence to the County Council for King’s County, which with its first action changed the name of the county to Offaly, after the ancient Gaelic Kingdom which the county was formed from. After the Civil War, he would go on to work in both Irish politics and with the Southern Cross newspaper.
Eamon’s sister Catalina would go on to marry IRA Chief of Staff and Amnesty International founder Sean MacBride, son of John MacBride and Maud Gonne. Further proving that everyone in Ireland either knows each other or is related, William Bulfin also had a cousin Sir Edward Bulfin, who was a General in the British Army in World War 1, and served with distinction at the First Battle of Ypres.
Decline
In the 1920s, with the fallout of the Irish War of Independence and Civil War, migration to Argentina again briefly increased, this time the majority were educated urban professionals, mainly with a Church of Ireland background. By the end of the 1920s, with the Great Depression taking an enormous toll on the economy, immigration again subsided. By the end of the Second World War, In the aftermath of the Second World War, migration from Ireland slowed to almost nothing. In addition, the Irish were now assimilating to Argentina much more than before, with Hispanicizing of names being now common, and frequently marrying outside the community, things that would have been unheard of in the nineteenth century.
This was all exacerbated when Juan Perón became President of Argentina, which led to the closing down of separate Irish schools. Further hardship awaited the Irish descendants during the Military Dictatorship from 1976 onwards. In 1976, during the Argentine government’s “Dirty War” against any political opposition, in the Saint Patrick’s Cathedral Massacre, Alfie Kelly, two other Pallottine priests, and two seminarians were executed by Argentine naval officers while sitting at their supper table, their bodies left where they were killed to be found by their parishioners.
Fr. Kelly was a spiritual advisor to the future Pope Francis, who opened the cause for beatification for those killed while Archbishop. They have since been declared martyrs of the church, and the process of canonizing them as saints is underway. Another massacre occurred in Holy Cross Church, an Irish church that was worshipped in for over a century, which was attacked by the Argentine army. Two French nuns, along with members of an anti-government NGO called “Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo” were dragged from the church, where they had sought out protection against the dictatorship’s hunt for “subversives”. They were later found to have been tortured and then executed by being thrown from an airplane. Both at home and in Argentina, the 1970s were a bad decade for the Irish.
One cannot talk of Irish Argentines in the mid-twentieth century without mentioning Ché Guevara, who was born to a wealthy family of Spanish and Irish ancestry. His great-grandfather Patrick Lynch was an Irishman from Galway and emigrated during the 1740s to Argentina. Ché’s father is quoted as saying "the first thing to note is that in my son's veins flowed the blood of the Irish rebels."
Unfortunately, the spirit of Irish rebellion was weaponized for evil in Ché, with him helping establish Communist rule in Cuba, a murderous and ruthlessly anti-clerical regime, and Ché himself being one of the most recognizable supporters and advocates of Soviet Communism during the Cold War, a system which was responsible for tens millions of deaths and countless atrocities and acts of repression around the world in the twentieth century.
Today
Thankfully, outside of outright leftists, the Irish community in Argentina, traditionally known for their social conservatism, do not embrace Ché Guevera as a hero figure. Irish-Argentines typically have a great distaste for Leftism, and are quick to disassociate from it. Instead, they prefer to memorialise the men of the nineteenth century who succeeded in carving out a new life for themselves, climbing the social ladder, while remaining authentically Irish. Men like Fr. Fahy, and William Brown. There are towns named "Duggan" and "O'Brien" after the wealthy landowners who helped establish the towns. The image they like to portray is of an aspirational elite, of pioneers with a distinctive identity and heritage, rather than of Leftist revolutionaries like Guevara.
Today, between 500,000 and 1,000,000 people in Argentina claim Irish ancestry. For comparison, 35 million people in the United States claim Irish ancestry. This figure represents the fifth-largest Irish diaspora community in the world, and the largest outside of the Anglosphere. The Southern Cross newspaper still continues, as do the hurling clubs. However, gone are the days of explicitly Irish settlements filled with ethnically and culturally homogenous communities with their separate language, names and ways of life.
With the decline of religious belief and churchgoing in most of the world, including in Argentina, this last apparatus of community organization for the Irish there is too on the way out. But Irish identity remains as a commemorative affair for the people there, who like the diaspora elsewhere value their heritage and history.
The history of these Irish settlers in a very foreign land, far from home and carving out separate spaces to cultivate and maintain their own distinctive heritage and identity can serve as great inspiration for Irish men and women everywhere today. Communities with their own newspapers, churches, names, norms and habits, forming collaborative networks that foster family formation, and economic opportunity. Men like Fr. Fahy and Thomas Armstrong, establishing themselves successfully and then creating a means for their countrymen from humble means to do the same.
Today, the advance of Liberal Globalism across the Western world, and the rapid decline of religiosity and churchgoing show no sign of changing in the near future. Irish Conservatives seeking to reconnect with their traditions, and re-establish strong communities, united in a common culture and creed, separate from the outside world in which they live, may look to the Irish settlers in nineteenth century Argentina not only as something worth admiring, but as something to aspire to re-create in their own era.
Footnotes:
Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures, p. 65.
Dr. Sarah O’Brien, “Irish in Argentina: Not Always a Successful Diaspora Story,” The Irish Times, February 5, 2018.
Sowell, Conquests and Cultures, 160, 430.