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The Irish Voice

Emigration and Colonialism

Updated: 5 days ago


Dr Niall Whelehan


WHEN Argentina and Leo Messi won the 2022 World Cup, one of the bright new stars of the team was Alexis MacAllister. Quickly achieving wider fame, MacAllister’s surname prompted curiosity in Scotland and Ireland about his family’s ancestry. When interviewed by The Athletic, his father clarified any doubts by stating: “According to our family, we came from Ireland, rather than Scotland.” More precisely, they traced their ancestors to a cottage in Donabate, County Dublin, from where they emigrated in the mid-19th century. While there was sadly no hope of Alexis MacAllister transferring to the Irish football team, the MacAllisters’ origins raised new interest in a less-familiar, but nonetheless significant, corner of the Irish diaspora.


The histories of Irish America and the Irish in Britain are well-known and larger centres of mass Irish immigration have overshadowed destinations that received smaller numbers of the remarkable amount of people that left Ireland in the modern era. Irish-Argentine links are perhaps most famous in the revolutionary Ernesto Ché Guevara’s Galway forebears, the Lynches. There is an inconspicuous statue of the Mayo-born William Brown, founder of the Argentine Navy, on Dublin’s quays. Beyond these notable individuals, many Irish emigrants like the MacAllisters made the long voyage to Argentina in the 19th century, albeit in much smaller numbers than the flows to the USA or Britain. They forged a significant diaspora community and played important roles in the history of the Argentine state.


Beginnings

Regular movement from Ireland to Argentina began in the 1820s. The Irish community there peaked in size around the 1870s, when contemporary estimates placed about 30,000 Irish people in Argentina. Small numbers of refugees from the Great Hunger of 1845-52 found their way to Argentina, but due to the higher cost and duration of the trip, most of the Irish who arrived there were not fleeing famine. Their movement was a classic example of chain migration, with most hailing from small areas in a handful of Irish counties, Westmeath, Wexford, Offaly and Longford. They came to be associated mainly with agriculture, sheep and cattle farming, while a smaller urban community of business people and workers lived in Buenos Aires.


In Argentina, new Irish arrivals often maintained English as their primary language, before Spanish. Because of this, Argentines often projected a group Anglophone identity onto them along with English, Scottish and Welsh immigrants. Collectively they were known as ‘Inglés,’ primarily for the language they spoke, but also because Irish and British settlers intermingled easily in business and agriculture, and socially.


Sometimes there were tensions among them too, and not always for reasons relating to politics in their home countries. In one memorable episode during the 1870s, an Irish doctor recounted how a Scottish couple—who worked as a caretaker and domestic servant at his property—secretly drank his whiskey when he went out on call. In order to solve the problem: “I decided on a plan which I thought would cure them. Into half a bottle of whiskey I put a quantity of tartar emetic.” After a day out, he returned home to find the couple in agony and ‘deadly sick,’ but he gave them a remedy which cured them by the following day. “After this, the whiskey was never touched,” he said. Whether in Ireland, Scotland or Argentina, don’t mess with the whiskey.


Visibility

Irish-Argentine history is most visible in the business people and large ranchers who often became quite wealthy in the second-half of the 19th century. They benefitted from contacts in London, then the international centre of finance, as well as their status as northern European immigrants. The histories of working class and lower-middle class Irish migrants in Argentina are harder to recover because there are not abundant archival sources to trace them. Irish migrants were often categorised simply as ‘inglés’ in official records. On the other hand, the stamp of the Irish business and agricultural elite is still recognisable today in buildings and street names in Buenos Aires and the names of some towns; Murphy, in Santa Fe province, for example. One tourism landmark in central Buenos Aires is the Kavanagh Building, built in the 1930s by Corina Kavanagh. It was the city’s first skyscraper and, for a while, the tallest building in South America.


Conquest

The history of Irish Argentine elites and the provenance of their wealth raises questions about emigrants’ involvement in different types of colonialism. Some Irish clergy, business people and ranchers considered themselves to be engaged in the expansion of the white European presence in South America, extending ideas of modernity and ‘civilisation.’ The establishment of vast sheep and cattle ranches by wealthy first- and second-generation Irish is also part of the history of the colonisation of lands inhabited by indigenous people and their forced displacement by the Argentine state in the 19th century.


The perception of indigenous people as a threat and a problem to be solved in Argentina was pronounced in the first issues of The Southern Cross, the Irish Catholic newspaper that began publishing in Buenos Aires in 1875, echoing other English and Spanish language newspapers of the city. Early articles, with titles such as ‘The Indians are Coming!’ emphasised the perceived dangers and lawlessness of the so-called frontier and vast plains. From 1878-1885 the Argentine military waged a series of campaigns, called ‘The Conquest of the Desert,’ to subjugate and remove indigenous people from the Pampas and Patagonia regions. The campaign was portrayed by officials and their supporters as a civilising mission that would secure lands for European-descent communities. The Southern Cross offered early praise for the campaigns, declaring that they meant ‘more than a mere expedition against the Indians and the more we see of the business the more we like it.’


During the ‘Conquest of the Desert’ vast territories were enclosed by the Argentine Army for agriculture and new settlements. The Southern Cross took active steps to encourage Irish people to take up residence on these lands, speaking of ‘New Irelands’ and claiming they would become the ‘centre of a thriving community in this wonderfully go ahead country.’ In the 1880s the editor of The Southern Cross, Fr Patrick Dillon, travelled to Ireland from Buenos Aires, at the direction of Argentina’s President Julio A Roca, for a tour to promote Irish immigration, with promises of state assistance to help new farmers get on their feet. The scheme failed, however, and Dillon reported that it was impossible to compete with the attractiveness of the USA among the would-be emigrants he met, many of whom had never heard of Argentina.


The case of Eduardo Casey

One of the most successful businessmen to emerge in this period was the second-generation Irishman Eduardo Casey. He acquired vast tracts of land shortly after they were brought under military control in the ‘Conquest of the Desert.’ He aimed to parcel them up for sale, with Irish settlers being given favourable terms, at least in his view.


By the 1880s, Casey owned huge estates, which were so expansive they had train stations within their borders and livestock numbering in the hundreds of thousands, including 80,000 horses. His land wealth was estimated at more than 350,000 hectares; a total amounting to almost twice the land area of Westmeath, the Irish county from where his parents had emigrated in 1830. Casey speculated extensively in land and acquired huge debts as well as profits. When the banking crisis of the 1890s hit, and he could no longer access credit, his empire went into freefall. He lost almost everything, and lived in modest circumstances until his death in 1906.


A chequered history

The wealth of Casey, the Kavanaghs, Murphys, and other Irish landowners was not emulated by the majority of Irish emigrants to Argentina in the 19th and early 20th centuries, who worked hard just to keep afloat. The Irish Catholic elite were by definition a small group, but their status contributed to wider perceptions among Argentines of all Irish migrants as ranchers and sheep farmers. Their wealth was the product of an era of land dispossession and the violent displacement of indigenous people. Their history demonstrates how the Irish diaspora was complex and diverse, incorporating people who left Ireland due to the effects of colonial rule, as well as people who fully engaged in colonial activities in their new homes.


Dr Niall Whelehan is a Senior Lecturer in History and part of the Modern Irish History group at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow. His most recent book is Changing Land: Diaspora Activism and the Irish Land War

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