Among this week’s birthdays, Thursday is the 150th of a remarkable Argentinian-Irish newspaper, the Southern Cross.
The title was first published on January 16th, 1875, in Buenos Aires, where it continues today, making it the world’s longest-running Irish newspaper produced outside Ireland, and among the oldest of any kind in Argentina.
As originally edited by Galway-born missionary Fr Patrick Joseph Dillon (1841-1889), its identity was unashamedly religious: “Catholic first, Irish after.”
He added: “The tone of the paper will be liberal (like the Freeman of Dublin) [but] will not adhere to any particular party in this country. The events of the week will be narrated with . . . a strictly impartial pen.”
Alas for Dillon, he was to be one of those blamed for the 1877 Dresden Affair, a debacle – named for the ship involved – that brought 1,800 poor Irish emigrants to a planned new colony, many dying en route or upon arrival.
In ill-health himself, Dillon soon returned to Ireland and his own demise, aged only 48. The Southern Cross carried on, meanwhile, thriving under his successor, a Corkman named Michael Dineen.
Subsequent editors included William Bulfin, from Offaly, whose travel writing among the gauchos of rural Argentina helped make the paper’s reputation (and whose son Eamon would in 1916 raise the “Irish Republic” flag over Dublin’s GPO).
The Southern Cross supported the Rising, “though not so enthusiastically”, according to one of its later editors, Fr Fred Richards, quoted in a 1990 Irishman’s Diary by Peadar Kirby. That ambivalence reflected the conservative nature of much of the Irish-Argentinian community.
Most 19th-century emigrants there were not fleeing the Famine, or poverty in general.
Where transportation to the US or Canada was free, it was expensive to travel to South America, so those who did so tended to have means.
As the current editor of the Southern Cross, Guillermo MacLoughlin Bréard, has explained, the typical Irish emigrants to Argentina were “second or third or fourth sons who wouldn’t inherit the farm”.
They first settled in the rich land north of Buenos Aires, then their offspring moved to the capital and into the professions.
This made for mixed political loyalties. Writing a history of the Argentinian Irish in 1919, through a prism of the new militant republicanism at home, Thomas Murray was amusingly vitriolic.
He lamented a section of the community who “grew into pretentious snobs and are today . . . the shoneen element in the Irish-Argentine community – the people who get themselves called ‘Anglo-Argentines’ in the press society notices”.
A forerunner of those, he alleged, was another Irish-born publisher, Michael Mulhall. Fourteen years before the Southern Cross, Mulhall and his brother Edward had founded Argentina’s first English-language newspaper, the Standard.
And rather than see the Cross as competition, they generously supported that too, allowing Dillon use their premises.
Murray was nevertheless damning: “[Michael Mulhall] was a true O’Connellite and, therefore, deeply loyal to ‘our gracious Queen’, as he used to write. We would call him a shoneen now, but that was the political cult of most of our public men under the O’Connell influence until the Fenian awakening came to save the masses.”
That the Standard failed eventually was to Murray no surprise: “The paper never got sufficient support from the Irish-Argentine community to keep it alive.” (He was somewhat premature in killing it off – it only closed in 1959).
The Southern Cross, by contrast, went on to negotiate the many crises, political and economic, that have swept its host country ever since, including the 1976 coup.
Kirby’s Diary was precipitated by Fr Richards’s fundraising visit to Ireland in 1990, seeking support for a paper he said was “fighting to survive” amid hyperinflation.
But it had already survived the era of Argentina’s military dictatorship, 1976-1983, when the threat was more than financial.
The Southern Cross took a brave stand against the junta’s abuses and an inspector named Kelly once warned Richards he had spotted a copy “on the desk of the desk of the Buenos Aires chief of police”.
Thirty-five years later, the paper has lived to celebrate its sesquicentenary in a country where the Irish diaspora now numbers half a million. It has a modest 2,000 subscribers but has always been widely shared, with a multiple of that number reading.
Another local publication, the Tribuna, once eulogised the Argentinian-Irish community for, among other things, “industry, integrity, and affable manners”.
It continued: “The Irishman does not come among us to grasp whatever is within his reach and having gained it takes the next steamer back to his native land . . . No, the Irishman settles down for life, buys a comfortable home and marries, brings his children up in the country and lives and dies in the land of his adoption.”
The story of the Southern Cross reflects this assimilation. The paper began life as an English-language weekly. Since 1977, it has been mainly in Spanish and now appears once a month.
Although the link with the old country remains, as with the diaspora in general, it has become a secondary loyalty. MacLoughlin Bréard explains: “We are Argentinian first but very proud of our Irish origin, so our main task is to preserve that new identity among all the members of our community.”