Viva Irlanda! Exploring the Irish in Argentina

An incredible bond that still remains strong

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As another famous Irish emigrant Fr. Anthony Fahy from Loughrea in Galway, who is equally memorialized in Recoleta cemetery for his work as a chaplain with the Irish communities, wrote at the time

"Would to God that Irish emigrants would come to this country, instead of going to the United States. Here they would feel at home, they would have plenty employment and experience a sympathy from the natives very different from what now drives too many of them from the States back to Ireland. There is not a finer country in the world for a poor man to come to."

While most of the Irish remained in rural occupations in the north of Argentina, some of them ventured  further south to work on the vast sheep  farms in Patagonia. They profited from a special arrangement known as ‘halves’ whereby the owner of the farm would entrust say, 2000 to 3000 head of sheep to an Irish shepherd who was expected to cover all the expenses of looking after the sheep. If at the end of the period, the flock had multiplied say four or five times, then this number was divided between the owner and the shepherd.

These Irish shepherds settled in the area and became owners in their own right. In the country, the new immigrants  had to fight against the native ‘Indians’ and overcome  climatic conditions very different to rural Ireland.

It is hardly likely however that they came across the original famed giants that Magellan, the Portuguese maritime explorer who, at the service of Spain led the first successful attempt at world circumnavigation, encountered in 1520. He was so impressed with their size that he supposedly named the whole region from the word  "patagon" meaning "land of big feet."

And it is when you see the wide open spaces of Patagonia, an area of over four hundred thousand square miles almost bereft of vegetation , which in Argentina stretches from the Andes mountains to the wild Atlantic coast  and down to the ‘ends of the earth’ in Tierra del Fuego, you begin to realize how challenging and dangerous the new life was for these Irish emigrants.

They would, unlike today’s tourists, have had the time or resources to travel to see the wonderful sights of Patagonia like the Perito Moreno glacier in the south or the lakes and mountains  of the Andes to the west.

Rather, they would have had to endure the hard life working as gauchos on the farms or guarding the sheep, watched over only by the soaring Andean condor in the sky and coping with the Patagonian  wind, which sometimes reaches one hundred and twenty mile an hour as it roars  across the plains of that semi desert.

It was at the north western tip of Patagonia in Bariloche too that I stood and wondered how a small town in a strange land could name not one, but two streets with the Irish name of  O’Connor and thus heap eternal confusion on tourists and postmen alike.

Bariloche has a splendid lake side setting  at the foothills of the Argentinean Andes. It  is  not unlike Switzerland but doesn’t have that same clutter or fussiness and the yodeling in the valleys. Given its location, under the shadows of an volcano,  it has a deceptively genteel air in the street cafes  where the locals munch creamy chocolates and sip cappuccinos.

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