Midlands and Wexford shepherds make the pampas Irish

The Irish who made the pampas their own were not famine refugees. They were younger sons and daughters of middling tenant farmers from two corners of Leinster, recruited by patrons already in Buenos Aires, filtered by a fare few could pay, and set to work minding other men's sheep. For about one in ten that work ended in land. For the rest it ended in wages, a return passage or a grave on the frontier.

Patrons before famine

Organised emigration began in the mid-1820s. Patrick McKenna's Maynooth thesis records that in 1826 a Liverpool bank sent Patrick Browne, of a Catholic gentry family in the Wexford baronies of Forth and Bargy, to the River Plate; he moved into salt beef and sent home for workers, who spent about a year in his salting houses and then herded sheep on shares. The merchant Thomas Armstrong recruited labourers from the Ballymahon, Ballymore and Mullingar district. John Thomond O'Brien, recruiting in Ireland, met John Mooney of Streamstown, whose arrival with his son-in-law Patrick Bookey in the late 1820s is the first named settler-employer in the record. McKenna also offers a family-memory story of an ex-soldier from Streamstown, but admits there is no evidence linking him to later emigration.

Two corners of Leinster

McKenna finds that about four-fifths of the settlers came from two districts: most of Westmeath, south Longford and a sliver of north Offaly, and Forth and Bargy in south Wexford. His explanation, patronage plus land hunger at the edge of Leinster's best grassland, is one historian's argument, not a settled fact. Edmundo Murray describes the emigrants as mostly younger sons and daughters of larger tenants. The fare from Liverpool was about £16 per adult in mid-century, four times the North American fare and about a year's wage for a labourer.

How many came

No reliable count exists. McKenna estimates 40,000 to 45,000 Irish emigrants in the nineteenth century and calls any overall figure highly speculative. Murray gives about 45,000 between 1830 and 1930, roughly half of whom returned or re-emigrated. Helen Kelly puts the number who migrated at about 7,000, and Sabato and Korol's settler figure of 10,500 to 11,500 is disputed. The censuses are firmer ground: Brad Lange gives 5,246 Irish-born in Buenos Aires province in 1869 and 4,693 in 1895, or 8,623 and 16,284 counting Argentine-born descendants.

Halves, thirds and wages

In McKenna's account a flock-owner with about 2,000 sheep went into partnership with an immigrant, usually for four years; at the end the owner took back his 2,000 plus an agreed share of the increase, usually half. Murray's version has flocks of 1,500 to 2,000, a good shepherd owning his own in two or three years and buying land after ten to fifteen. Only about 10 per cent of emigrants could buy land. Rising sheep values in the 1850s pushed newcomers on to "thirds", and by the late 1850s many owners paid wages instead.

The Duggan brothers owned about 65,000 hectares in 1888, and John Murphy of Kilrane, Co. Wexford, who had landed in 1844 with £1, left heirs who inherited about 40,000 hectares in 1909.

The camp also broke people. McKenna reconstructs the rancho from settlers' accounts: a single opening covered by a horsehide, an ox skull for a chair, and prosperity showing first in a wooden door to protect a wife alone in the house. Many shepherds came back broken or insane from near-total solitude, often made worse by drink, and a flood, blizzard or drought could wipe out a flock. John Brabazon recalled his first wife, Honoria, and her sister stabbed to death in their home by a passing gaucho, and described Saturday-night brawls at the pulpería between Ballymore and Ballymahon men armed with sharpened sticks.

From Chascomús to the frontier

The Irish settled first south of the city around Chascomús and Dolores, then moved north-west between the Salado and Paraná rivers. In 1869 Carmen de Areco held the largest Irish population of any partido, 433 people, followed by Mercedes and Suipacha, Salto, San Andrés de Giles, San Antonio de Areco, Navarro and Chacabuco. By 1895 the weight had moved to Arrecifes, Pergamino and southern Santa Fe, where Eduardo Casey, born at Lobos to Irish parents, founded Venado Tuerto. By then the sheep era was over: the 1870s restructuring of the rural economy left surplus Irish labour, and sheep gave way first to cattle and then to grain.