Priests, papers and a disastrous ship

For half a century the Irish of Buenos Aires province lived inside a world that a Dominican from Loughrea built for them: chapels, chaplains, a bank in a priest's name, schools, and later newspapers that argued over who the Irish were. The world worked until a ship full of strangers arrived in 1889.

Fahy's system

Anthony Fahy was born in Loughrea, Co. Galway, in 1805, ordained in 1831, and was prior of Black Abbey, Kilkenny, when Archbishop Murray of Dublin named him Irish chaplain to Buenos Aires in 1843, according to Moira Casey. The British Packet recorded his arrival on the brig Plata from Liverpool on 11 January 1844. McKenna's thesis gives 1842 and 1843 in different places, so this site uses the newspaper's date.

McKenna writes that Fahy held immigrants' savings and property in his own name, acting as their banker and agent, and placed assistant chaplains first at Chascomús and Dolores, then at Mercedes, San Antonio de Areco and Chivilcoy. In 1847 he formed a famine committee; McKenna says more than £400 was sent. A group of Sisters of Mercy arrived on 24 February 1856. Edmundo Murray writes that Fahy kept the community separate and English-speaking, while Helen Kelly reportedly says he required priests from Ireland to speak Spanish. McKenna, from interviews with elderly priests, concludes that clergy-enforced marriage within the community lasted until the 1940s.

Not a saint

Casey calls Fahy a firm defender of Rosas. The case that follows him is Camila O'Gorman, granddaughter of the merchant Thomas O'Gorman, who eloped with the priest Ladislao Gutiérrez in December 1847 and was shot with him at Santos Lugares on 18 August 1848. Murray's dictionary entry says Fahy and the lawyer Vélez Sarsfield demanded exemplary punishment; Casey says Rosas consulted Fahy, who approved the execution. No primary source has been opened for either claim, so this site says only that, according to those historians, Fahy backed the sentence. He died on 20 February 1871 during the yellow-fever epidemic, of the fever according to the chronicles or of heart disease according to his death certificate, and lies at Recoleta a few steps from Admiral Brown, to whom he had given the last rites in 1857.

After Fahy: orders and schools

Patrick Joseph Dillon succeeded him as Irish chaplain in 1871. An Irish committee paid the Passionist order in Dublin for Irish priests; Rome sent others, the Irish protested, and McKenna says the quarrel split the community. Fr Fidelis Kent Stone arrived in 1881 and won the Irish over, and Holy Cross church became a centre of Irish Argentine life. The Pallottines opened St Patrick's school in Mercedes in February 1887, and the Irish Catholic Association was founded in 1883.

Two newspapers, two identities

The Standard was launched on 1 May 1861 by the Dublin-born brothers Michael George and Edward Thomas Mulhall. Its opening editorial argued that the people of all the British Isles shared one tongue. The Southern Cross, first issued by Dillon on 16 January 1875, promised a liberal tone and no attachment to any Argentine party. Dillon, born in the archdiocese of Tuam in 1841 or 1842, nonetheless backed the Irish landed class, and in 1879 led the General Brown Club. The paper described the Irish as civilised colonists and the Indigenous population as savages, a justification for frontier land-taking. Most settlers were recorded, and recorded themselves, as ingleses, Murray finds.

The City of Dresden

The government granted 50,000 free or assisted tickets, and in 1887 John Stephen Dillon, the priest's brother, and Buckley O'Meara were appointed agents in Europe with a bonus for each emigrant landed. The steamer sailed from Queenstown on 25 January 1889 with 1,772 emigrants, about 1,500 of them Irish, by the National Maritime Museum of Ireland's count, or about 2,000 by Michael Geraghty's.

They landed in mid-February to nothing. Geraghty records that the immigrants' hotel had no beds, that families were separated, and that some single women were lured into brothels. About 700 went to a colony at Napostá near Bahía Blanca and found no houses. More than 100 died, mostly children, before the colony was dissolved in March 1891. Archbishop Croke wrote to the Freeman's Journal urging the Irish poor not to go, and organised Irish emigration to Argentina ended. One institution grew from the wreck: on 14 May 1891 the Ladies of St Joseph's Society founded the Fahy Institute for orphan boys.