Story of the Irish in Argentina

Story of the Irish in Argentina Synopsis

Thomas Murray's The Story of the Irish in Argentina was first published in New York in 1919. During the nineteenth century, nearly 45,000 Irish-born individuals emigrated to Argentina. They were members of medium tenant families from Westmeath, Longford, Offaly, and Wexford (though Dublin, Cork, and Clare were well represented). This edition with a valuable introductory essay by the journalist Michael John Geraghty, who has lived for over 40 years in Buenos Aires, makes an important, critical account of Ireland's lesser-written-about diasporas available again. Thomas Cornelius Murray (1871-1959), historian, was born in Kilbeggan, Co. Westmeath, probably the son of Patrick Murray and Anne Molloy. In 1897 Thomas Murray emigrated with his family to the United States and in the first years of the twentieth century he went to Argentina. Murray left Buenos Aires in 1913 with the objective to publish in New York the history of the Irish in Argentina as well as some of his poems. In New York, Thomas Murray published The Story of the Irish in Argentina (New York: P. J. Kenedy & Sons, 1919), and returned in 1924 to Argentina to promote his work. The book was received unsympathetically by the Irish-Argentine media and community. "Although there are some assertions when the author advances his own personal opinions, with which we are not in agreement, we find this book intensely interesting" (The Southern Cross). His work remains the only published history (in English) about the Irish emigration to Argentina. This new edition of The Story of the Irish in Argentina becomes, then, a landmark on the road to recovering the history and contribution of an Irish emigrant community, and a point of departure-together with other more recently published investigations-, for the study of a 'forgotten' diaspora.

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