Margarita Morgan

Margarita Morgan was born Margarita Mooney at Pergamino in 1839, the daughter of William Mooney of Milltown, Co. Westmeath, according to the SILAS dictionary. She died at San Antonio de Areco on 31 October 1923. Historians agree that Irish-Argentine women are badly under-studied. Those who appear in the record are mostly servants, nuns and teachers, and, like Morgan, benefactors and widows who ran estancias and endowed churches and schools.

Her gifts were on a large scale. In 1896 she gave the altars of the Irish saints, Patrick, Brigid, Columcille and others, to the basilica at Luján. At San Antonio de Areco, which the Irish Argentine Historical Society calls a typically Irish town, she founded the María Clara Morgan hospital in 1900 and gave St Patrick's chapel in 1902; the Society says she built St Patrick's church and the Clonmacnoise school in memory of her parents. In 1908 she received the papal decoration Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice. A Morgan Hospital was still noted in Areco when the Society's page was written in 2004.

The dates of her school are not settled. The Society's page dates Clonmacnoise to 1902, while Roger's study of Irish schools in Argentina gives 22 March 1922 and dates a St Mary's at Areco to 16 March 1901, so we say only that the school was founded through her gifts. Her story sits with those of other women benefactors of her generation: the Ladies of St Joseph's Society, who founded the Fahy Institute in 1891, and Cristina Keating, who funded an institute for girls in 1912.