Patrick Lynch

Patrick Lynch was born in 1715 at Lydican Castle, Co. Galway, to parents from two of the Galway "tribes". Edmundo Murray's dictionary says he left Ireland in the 1740s and settled in Buenos Aires in 1749; Nathan Mannion of EPIC, the Irish Emigration Museum, told TheJournal.ie that he came via Bilbao, arrived as a militia captain and married a wealthy heiress. The same article also quotes Mannion saying the family emigrated in the later 1800s, which contradicts its own 1749 date, and Wikipedia's family trees count the generations differently. The site uses 1749, following Murray and EPIC. No source opened gives his date of death.

Lynch belongs to the period before any Irish community existed on the River Plate. McKenna argues that Irish defeats in 1601 and the 1640s sent the Gaelic elite and their soldiers to Catholic Europe, chiefly Spain, and that exile merchant houses such as the Lynches traded from Galway, Bordeaux, Lisbon and Cádiz; younger sons of Catholic Connacht families kept going to Spain for education and careers until the late 1700s. By the early 1800s the Lynches were part of the Buenos Aires merchant elite.

He is the ancestor of the Argentine Lynches, among them the novelist Benito Lynch and, six generations on through his father Ernesto Guevara Lynch, Ernesto "Che" Guevara. Murray finds no evidence that Che identified with Irish culture, so the Galway link is documented but remote.