found themselves destitute. The ‘Dresden Affair’ discouraged further significant migration. ‘Buenos Aires is a most cosmopolitan city’, ranted the Catholic Archbishop of Cashel in The Freeman’s Journal in 1889, ‘into which the Revolution of 1848 has brought the scum of European scoundrelism. 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.’
The 1889 intake aside, most Irish immigrants were younger children of middling tenant sheep farming families from the Irish Midlands: half were from Co. Westmeath, with significant contributions from Longford, Offaly, Wexford, Clare, Cork and Dublin. They settled mainly in the rich pastures around the mouth of the River Plate, near Buenos Aires and Santa Fé, spilling over into modern Uruguay too, with some becoming merchants in Buenos Aires itself.
A strong sense of Irish identity was maintained by mutual self-help, intermarriage and the deliberate policy of their priests. They founded a Gaelic Athletic Association and Hurling Club, supported the struggle for Irish independence, and were known collectively by a misnomer, gauchos ingleses. ‘In no part of the world’, proclaimed The Southern Cross (16 January 1875), ‘is the Irishman more respected and esteemed than in the province of Buenos Aires; and in no part of the world, in the same space of time, have Irish settlers made such large fortunes.’
Under Argentinean law, all children had to be registered with Spanish names. The first generation of Irish born there tended to give their children Hispanicised Christian names, such as Tomás for Thomas, but in normal life they used the Anglicised versions. Thomas Bulfin (1863–1910) from Co. Offaly wrote a very influential collection of stories of pioneering Argentina, Tales of the Pampas, and here all the Irish characters have Anglicised names – ‘Patrick Delaney’, ‘Joseph Hagan’, and so forth. The second and subsequent generations, though, tended to use their Spanish names in Spanish.
Life on the Pampas
John Brabazon (1828–1914) came from a Protestant landed family in Mullingar, Co. Westmeath. His uncle was killed by Catholics for being ‘a Protestant dog’, so John left for a better life in Argentina, reaching Buenos Aires in 1845. He rode to El Arazá, Chascomús, where he built his puesto and established a flock of sheep. Over the next 20 years he worked as ‘sheep-farmer, ditch-digger, builder, carpenter, wholesaler, stock farmer, and merchant’, and hunted with the Indians in his spare time. John became a Catholic to marry Honor MacDonnell in Buenos Aires, but she and her sisters were murdered by outlaw gauchos. He married secondly Mary Wallace, became a Justice of the Peace in Necochea, Buenos Aires Province, in 1890, and died there in 1914. He recorded his adventures in a manuscript The Customs and Habits of the Country of Buenos Ayres from the year 1845, which was published in 1981.
Censuses
Censuses were taken nationally in 1869, 1895 and 1914 and for Buenos Aires alone in 1855, the latter being the only significant area of European settlement. These and other local censuses, which include age, occupation and nationality, are at the Archivo General de la Nacion and provincial archives.
Religious registers
Church registers, mainly Catholic, are generally held by churches. A fire in 1955 destroyed many of the early Buenos Aires registers, but most for the 19th century – the key period of Irish
migration – survive. Gravestones often identify precise places of origin in Ireland. Generally, they must be sought in graveyards, as few have been transcribed.
Newspapers
The Irish community in Argentina was deliberately held together, as a bastion against the British, by its priests, led by Fr. Anthony Fahy (d. 1871) and his successor Fr. Patrick Joseph Dillon. Dillon founded The Southern Cross for this purpose in 1875, and it remains a focus for the
Trounced by Evita
One Irish family rose to the very top of Argentinean society. Edelmiro Julián Farrell was born on 12 February 1887 in Villa de los Industriales, Lanús, Buenos Aires, son of Juan Farrell (b. 1846), who was in turn son of Matthew Farrell (d. 1860) from Co. Longford. Edelmiro joined the army and went to Italy to train under Mussolini’s Fascists. He then became a major general back in Argentina, and assisted in Pedro Ramierez’s coup that made a president out of Arturo Rawson. Ramierez soon replaced Rawson, but was himself deposed in a pro-German coup whereupon, in March 1944, Edelmiro Farrell became President of the Argentine Republic.
At the end of the War, Farrell began losing popularity to his vice president, Col. Juan D. Perón (1895–1974). Perón’s overwhelming support from the poor and the younger element in the army was greatly enhanced by his charismatic wife Eva Duarte, known to the world as Evita. After the election of February 1946, Farrell conceded power to Perón. He lived on peacefully until his death at the Kavanagh Building, Buenos Aires, on 31 October 1980.
Joined-up genealogy
Eduardo Coghlan (1912–97) compiled two monumental works on Irish-Argentinean genealogy, Los Irlandeses en la Argentina: Su Actuación y Descendencia (Buenos Aires, 1987), and El Aporte de los Irlandeses a la Formación de la Nación Argentina
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