BOOK OF THE DAY: Irish "Ingleses": The Irish Immigrant Experience in Argentina 1840-1920By Helen Kelly Irish Academic Press 270 pp, €26.95
IRISH EMIGRATION to the US, Australia and Britain is well documented. Less well known is the migration of about 7,000 Irish people to Argentina who, being English speakers, were classified as “Ingleses”.
Immigrants to the US and Australia seemed better able to maintain twin national identities without a sense of divided loyalty. This book attempts to analyse the identity of these Irish-Argentines and to what extent they became part of that Ingles grouping.
The author makes an important distinction between emigration, which is often discretionary, and exile which is usually coerced. Most 19th-century Irish emigrants fall into the latter category and this shaped their experience as settlers in Latin America and elsewhere. Push-pull factors and the clan effect were the same for those choosing Argentina as much as other parts of the world, although the author notes their life in South America was very different to other favoured destinations. Many settlers came from small farms in Longford, Westmeath and Wexford but it isn’t made clear why they originated principally from these counties. Records indicate at least one parish moved en masse to Argentina seeking a better life.
There were additional factors at play. At one stage the Argentine government employed two doubtful individuals, O’Meara and Dillon, to recruit Irish migrants. They were so successful selling a pipe dream of a sophisticated European-style capital city with limitless farmland waiting to be claimed that no fewer than 1,700 Irish arrived on one ship. But, not having a support network of friends and relations, most became destitute. The sophistication of Buenos Aires had its limits: one settler commented that without a sewage system, the prevailing noxious atmosphere belied the city’s name.
Some, like Peter Sheridan from Cavan, made their fortune. He landed with virtually nothing in 1817 and when he died in 1844 owned 40,000 sheep. Peter Casey came from Westmeath about 1830 and was the first rancher to pay 1 million pesos for farmland. However, there were not too many Irish immigrants like these.
Recognising the need for assimilation, Irish Dominican priest Anthony Fahey insisted priests coming from Ireland should be able to speak Spanish.
Interestingly, the author notes that the large number of Italian settlers were divided between those who were urban, learned and anticlerical and those who were rural, uneducated and held conventional religious beliefs. One Italian cleric was not well disposed to Irish-Argentine women, describing them as “a gang of biddies”.
A key figure in political life was William Bulfin, editor of the Irish-Argentine paper The Southern Cross, still going strong. A close associate of Arthur Griffith, he opposed the Boer War and did much to establish the Gaelic League in Argentina, putting Irish nationalism on a firm footing.
The chapter on the myth of Irish social deviancy focuses on the links between poverty, drink and mental illness. The cause of the latter was said to be alcohol-related insanities and “religious melancholy”. Once again the fact that the Irish were part of the Ingleses makes it difficult to estimate crime or mental illness figures and thus any indicative level of assimilation.
This is an academic study peppered with statistics, tables and footnotes. A map would have been useful and some information on the Irish-Argentines in the photographs who are largely unmentioned in the text. The subtitle refers to the “Irish immigrant experience in Argentina” but the book is as much about Irish immigrant identity. It would be interesting to learn more about today’s Irish-Argentines, how many there are, how conscious they are of their Irish roots and whether it is indeed true there are areas of Patagonia where the people’s accent has more than a slight trace of Mullingar.
Fergus Mulligan is the author ofThe Trinity Year just published by Gill Macmillan and Trinity College Dublin and a forthcoming biography of the great Irish railway engineer, William Dargan.