Loughrea

Loughrea, in east Galway, was the birthplace of Anthony Dominic Fahy. Moira Casey's 2021 study gives his birth as 11 January 1805; Juan José Delaney gives 1804, and the SILAS dictionary misprints the date in its text. He received the Dominican habit in 1828, studied in Rome and was ordained in 1831, worked as a missionary in Kentucky and Ohio in the 1830s, and was prior of Black Abbey in Kilkenny when Archbishop Murray of Dublin named him Irish chaplain to Buenos Aires in 1843. A contemporary newspaper records his arrival on the brig Plata from Liverpool on 11 January 1844.

In Buenos Aires he built an Irish-run Catholic network with the merchant Thomas Armstrong: city chapels, travelling ministry to the sheep camps, job-finding, marriages, banking and famine relief in 1847. He described himself as consul, postmaster, judge, pastor, interpreter and provider of work for his people. Historians also record his support for Rosas and, according to Edmundo Murray and Casey, his backing for the sentence on Camila O'Gorman in 1848. He gave William Brown the last rites in 1857, died on 20 February 1871 during the yellow-fever epidemic, and lies in Recoleta a few steps from Brown.

Loughrea stayed in his story. McKenna says Fahy's sister, prioress of the Carmelite convent in Loughrea, persuaded the Sisters of Mercy to open a school and run an Irish hospital in Buenos Aires. A story that Fahy arranged for young women from Loughrea to emigrate was seen only in a search summary and is unconfirmed. The research records no memorial to Fahy in the town.