Paper woven from thin threads of tradition

Sideline Cut: The current office of The Southern Cross (La Cruz del Sur) newspaper in Buenos Aires is at the rear of a modest building in what was, in the early days of the last century, the epicentre of Irish power in the city.

Established in 1875, it is the oldest newspaper in the city and - as far as the current staff can ascertain - the first one set up by the Irish diaspora. It is quite close to the Plaza de Irlande, which has a bust of Patrick Pearse - the second such commemoration, as local dissidents blew up the original statue during the Falklands War assuming he was an English hero.

"The fools, the fools," mutters Santiago (Jimmy) O'Durnin with a glint. O'Durnin is the paper's executive editor. Through a narrow corridor, to the third floor in a quaint elevator and there is the front office of the newspaper, the title modestly laminated on the front.

O'Durnin's father was a hurler for La Plata Gaels and although he also played regularly when he was young, his athletic days coincided with the fading of the sport in the city and like so many of his peers he turned to hockey, and represented Argentina from 1959 to '62. He is glad to say that the weekend's Eircell All Star exhibition at the Hurling Club was a sporting highlight.

Although third generation Irish, he speaks fluent English in a broad Irish accent, a not uncommon trait. He is sprightly and editorial in the old-school way. This is not a full-time occupation, more a labour of love.

"Someone asked me to give a hand at the office and there is an obligation to help maintain the tradition. Of course the two hours you promise yourself turns into a lot more and then you develop an interest in the paper and spend all your time here," he says.

The place is sultry in the mid-afternoon heat and quiet, apart from the rotating fans that ripple the various posters and messages that have been attached to the walls. There is a series of photographs of the established Irish forefathers - William Bulfin, Fr Anthony Fahy and JP Harte, first president of the Buenos Aires Hurling Club. There are also framed portraits of JFK, Dev, Pearse and of Mary Robinson, who visited the offices not as president but as United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.

The legacy of The Southern Cross, though, is not the building - the paper has had a nomadic existence - but rather the archives that are completely intact. The original papers, from the very first front page which carried advertisements and a breathless report of a shocking Indian raid on the town of Azul, are all preserved in aged hardback books which are indexed on shelves behind the editor's desk.

On August 17th, 1900, a page was devoted to the rules of hurling, along with a spacious diagram on the layout of the teams, then 17-a-side with a sweeper system of a Left Point and a Right Point preceding the now established full-back line.

The merits of the game were the subject of enthusiastic debate, with one commentator declaring: "Hurling is a more attractive, graceful and manlier game when played well than football could ever be at its best." Clause three of its "Constitution and Rules" reads: "That the Buenos Aires Gaelic Athletic Association shall be a strictly non-political and non-sectarian association."

However, at the silver jubilee of the Hurling Club in 1925, Mr G Foley wrote that "hurling is saturated with the spirit of Irish Nationalism - Irlande Libra - and so long as it maintains this spirit vital and flaming, it will live. If it ever loses this spirit it will no longer be hurling, it will have no justification for its existence".

Around the association and the string of teams that were established in the first decades of the 20th century - Almirante Brown, the Fahy Boys, Santos Lugares Gaels - revolved the social aspects of Irish-Argentine life. The notices and articles are typical of many small Irish broadsheets of the time - weddings, meetings and St Patrick's Day celebrations.

O'Durnin says it is hard to pinpoint when the highest circulation was, but by 1900 the province of Buenos Aires ordered 500 copies on a weekly basis to disperse through its official buildings, a reflection of its standing in the greater community.

Dean Patrick Dillon, who moved to the city immediately after his ordination at All Hallows in Dublin, founded The Southern Cross. O'Durnin says that the great gift that he and those like him brought was their instant understanding of the need to promote a definitive Irish identity in a new land teeming with cultures trying to find themselves in what many describe as an accidental country.

Although the newspaper switched to Spanish in 1950, its English content is rising again, a fact that has encouraged many schools to stock it. The Southern Cross is monthly now, with sales of around 2,000. Its survival is threatened by Argentina's foundering economy. A switch to black and white is the main thrust of a cost-cutting drive and the anxious wait follows to see if the drop in circulation is significant.

O'Durnin has had a successful life in Argentina but has grown accustomed to crisis. There is a deep worry, however, about the slow-sliding nature of this latest debacle. He reckons that if President Duhalde plays it even half right and "does not rob the poor too much", then perhaps Argentina can be steered towards stability once more.

For now O'Durnin can only, like the rest of the population, simply wait it out and go about putting the paper together for the small percentage of the Argentine-Irish community who have managed to retain such a deep affinity for the old country. He is neither hot-tempered nor fatalistic about the uncertainty.

"You do not come here very often. Perhaps we will go for a beer," he suggests to the visiting Irish party.

That so many of the early Irish did so well - there are records of Irish names in those who arrived with the Spanish in the 1700s and by 1880 the last of the estimated 100,000 original settlers had arrived - meant that they not only found a foothold in the city, they helped define it. But the assimilation was so smooth that many of the descendants are Irish merely in name and have only a tenuous knowledge of or interest in the past. They are, understandably, much more preoccupied with the future of their own country.

But The Southern Cross is a remarkable testimony to the extraordinary vitality and energy of the missionaries and frontiersmen of 100 years ago and its unlikely survival a tribute to those Argentine-Irish whose closeness to this country is astonishing and touching.