Mullingar

Mullingar is the county town of Westmeath, the county that sent more emigrants to Argentina than any other. Patrick McKenna says the merchant Thomas Armstrong recruited labourers from the Ballymahon, Ballymore and Mullingar district, and that an unusually high share of labouring-class emigrants came from the Ballymore Poor Law district, which took in Mullingar. Midlands emigrants could reach Dublin by Royal Canal boat, which served Mullingar from 1806. The emigrant John Brabazon, writing in 1842 of brawling Westmeath and Longford men on the pampas, called them "such divils as ever filled the Jail of Mullingar". Alice Ginnell, the Spanish-speaking partner in her husband Laurence's 1921–22 Dáil mission to Argentina, was born at Kilbride, Mullingar, in 1882, and Edward Cavanagh, who later divided 36,000 hectares among his children, was born at Long Linn, Mullingar, in 1834.

Today Mullingar Library is the Irish home of the records. According to the Westmeath Examiner, it holds Eduardo Coghlan's 1987 genealogy, which it says lists the ancestry and descendants of 4,349 emigrants, and early editions of The Southern Cross on microfilm; a digitisation project announced in 2025 aims to make the newspaper searchable online. The Longford Westmeath Argentina Society was founded in Mullingar around 1989. A Heritage Council-funded oral-history project on the Argentine emigration, run by the Longford and Westmeath county councils, ended with an event at Mullingar Library in 2026 at which the Argentine ambassador gave participants copies of their interviews; the archive is held in the Westmeath and Longford libraries. The library also hosts Heritage Week talks on the project.