John Mooney

John Mooney of Streamstown, Co. Westmeath, is the first named Irish settler-employer of the nineteenth century in Argentina. Patrick McKenna, citing Thomas Murray's 1919 history, names Mooney and his son-in-law Patrick Bookey, also of Streamstown, as the first recorded Irish emigrants of the century, arriving in Buenos Aires in 1827; Nally says Mooney was born in 1803 and arrived in 1828. We say only that he arrived in the late 1820s. The SILAS entry on John Thomond O'Brien says O'Brien met Mooney during his recruiting trip of the late 1820s.

Mooney and Bookey became, in McKenna's account, the most important employers of Irish labour in their meat-salting works, the saladeros. The early recruits of the Westmeath chain came from around Streamstown, and McKenna's figures put about three-fifths of all permanent Irish settlers in Argentina from the Westmeath–Longford–Offaly district. His son-in-law stayed prominent: Patricio Bookey was treasurer of Fr Fahy's famine relief committee in 1847.

The Irish presence Mooney joined was tiny, fewer than 500 people in 1824 by the British consul's count. Most of those who followed went into sheep on frontier land that, McKenna argues, creole owners financed partly as a buffer against Indigenous groups, and Edmundo Murray estimates that only about one emigrant in ten ever owned land.