Ирландцы и Южная Америка (english)

The Irish and South America After the defeat of Napoleon and his armies in Europe,thousands upon thousands of soldiers and sailors found themselves demobbed andat a loose end. From 1817 onwards, for a number of years, many Irish volunteersso discharged elected to serve the newly emerging states in South America, suchas in the armies of Simon Bolivar in the fight for the freedom of Colombia.

Ofthe thousands who stout for South America, only hundreds arrived, as shipwreckand disease took a heavy toll. Of the hundreds, many were trained seamen,officers and other ranks, who had volunteered for or had been press-gangedinto the British Navy. Long before the first arrivistes came to join in theSouth American wars of freedom from centuries of Spanish oppression, there werefamous leaders of

Irish stock who had helped put the countries of their adoptionon the map. The links between Ireland and South America havefrequently been forged through soldiers or sailors of fortune offering theirservices to the emergent South American republics, and yet there have been manylinks in peacetime. In our time there are many individual Irish missionarieswho have volunteered to devote their lives

to work among the poor and oppressedin the slums of South American capital cities, and in remote rural areas, wherethe peasantry are under constant threat of starvation, or worse, labouringunder oppressive military regimes. In the years following World War II, thelead was given to newly ordained priests in Cork to go out to serve the poor ofSouth America by the

Reverend Archdeacon Canon Duggan of Cork, who was later todie in the South American mission field at the age of seventy-five. Many purely commercial links were forged by the men andwomen of County Meath who went out to South America, notably to the Argentine,because of their expert knowledge of cattle and cattle breeding.

WilliamBulfin, in his work Rambles in Erin, first published in 1907, about histhree-thousand-mile cycle ride throughout the length and breadth of Ireland,recalls the ties between Buenos Aires and Mullingar. On the road to the great cattletown of Mullingar he says I was told by a truthful man up the road thatone could not see a soul in this part of the country who has not a relation inArgentina.

When the local people heard he had been in Buenos Aires, theycrowded around him I stayed with them for more than two hours. A few ofthem remembered their Spanish and plied me with it. There were brothers andsisters of men I had met on the pampas, and nieces and nephews and even parentsas well. Bulfin had emigrated to Argentina amp om Galway at the age ofseventeen, and had worked as a range hand

on the pampas. He became a journalistand edited The Soouthern Cross of Buenos Aires. He returned to Ireland in 1902.Irish Wexford Rising of 1798, was taken prisoner, and wasallowed to go to France. Napoleon offered to create him a general, but hedeclined, and formed an

Irish Brigade, which served in Simon Bolivar s Army ofIndependence. In his time he was known as the Lafayette of South America, and became a general in the army of Venezuela. Simon Boliv saide-de-camp and personal secretary was Daniel Floerence O Leary, who was bornin Cork in 1800.

He joined a regiment of hussars and fought in the Bolivian Warof Independence. He was made minister for Peru for his services, to Brazil,Chile and the Central States of America. He died in Bogota in 1877. Imperial order of Spain, and fought on both sides of the

American CivilWar, one of the strangest battles ever fought by Irishmen was in the service ofMexico, against the Imperial might of the United States of America.This was in 1847, before Mexico found oil and earned the respect of hernorthern neighbour. Today, because of an educational system which owes much tothe Irish Christian Brothers, many Mexicans are aware of

Ireland and herhistory and every year, on the feast of Saint Patrick, they pay tribute, inMexico City, to the mernory of the Irish soldiers of the heroic SaintPatrick s Battalion, martyrs who gave their lives for the cause of Mexicoduring the unjust North American invasion of 1847. It is a curiousstory, and a plaque on the wall in the

Plaza San Jacinto, a suburb of MexicoCity, names seventy-one Irishmen of the Mexican Saint Patrick s Battalion whowere either hanged or imprisoned by the invading United States Army. The namesare there for all to read O Reilly, Hanly, Sheehan, Hogan, Delaney,0 Connor, Nolan, Dalton, Fitzpatrick, Casey, McDowell, Cavanaugh,

Cassidy,Daly, Kelly, Murphy More than 50 were to die by the old-fashionedhangman s rope of the United States Army.