Ballymore and the Westmeath sending district

Most Irish emigrants to Argentina came from one district: most of Westmeath, south Longford and a small part of north Offaly. Patrick McKenna's thesis puts the district's share of permanent settlers at about 61 per cent, and Edmundo Murray, using Eduardo Coghlan's data, gives Westmeath alone 43 per cent and Longford 15 per cent. Murray lists Multyfarnham, Ballinacarrigy, Moyvore, Ballymore and Drumraney as the Westmeath home parishes. Ballinacarrigy was the second-largest emigration area until 1880. Kirby's 1992 study traced most 1860s emigrants to around Ballymore, a village remembered as having "two ends and no middle" because so many houses emptied.

The chain began at Streamstown. McKenna, citing Thomas Murray, names John Mooney and his son-in-law Patrick Bookey of Streamstown as the first recorded nineteenth-century emigrants, arriving in Buenos Aires in 1827; Nally gives 1828. They became the most important employers of Irish labour at their meat-salting works. John Thomond O'Brien met Mooney on his recruiting trip in the late 1820s, and Thomas Armstrong, from near Athlone, recruited from the Ballymahon, Ballymore and Mullingar district. McKenna explains the pattern as patronage plus land hunger at the edge of Leinster's good grassland; it is one historian's thesis.

Families sold up to go. On 28 March 1863 Nicholas Cunningham of Ballymore signed his share of the family farm over to his brother for his fare and some cash. Eamon Bulfin's mother, Ann O'Rourke, was from Ballymore.

The link lives on. The Longford Westmeath Argentina Society, founded in Mullingar around 1989, holds an annual asado at The Rustic Inn in Abbeyshrule on a Saturday near 20 July; about 130 people attended in 2026, with the Argentine ambassador.