Book review: Paisanos
THE evocatively-named Bernardo O’Higgins knew what he was talking about when, writing in 1823, he said: “Only one obstacle presents itself to Irish farmers that could prevent them from establishing themselves in Chile — distance between the bay of Cork and the port of Concepción, a four-month journey.”
And yet, as Tim Fanning’s exploration of the ‘other’ Irish diaspora makes clear, many did make that crossing, and with it etched their names into South American folklore. ‘Paisanos’, or ‘countrymen’, were exactly what many Irish became in countries such as Argentina, Chile and Bolivia, spread across centuries and all over this vast continent, only for the stories and accomplishments to somehow slip out of our collective consciousness in a way that never happened with tales of the Irish in America, Australia or across the water in Britain.
Paisanos looks to fill in some of the cracks in our general knowledge and throws up an intriguing story of achievements, misdemeanors and (mis)adventure.
Fanning, son of Professor Ronan Fanning, didn’t lick his skills as a historian off a stone, but as a former newspaperman he writes with real verve as he takes us through a sometimes bewildering cast of characters who, in the main, seem to have forged remarkable lives by being in the right place at the right time.
The flow of people began with the Penal Laws in Ireland, and the scattering of the Wild Geese to Europe and in particular to Spain, then a place in a constant state of foment.
The book neatly splits the story between the Irish who were either helping to build the states of South America, or at least their own place in it, and the revolutionaries who followed.
According to the author, while modern day South America knows its Irish history, we have let many of these figures slip out of our rear view.
“I think a lot of Irish people are aware of names such as Bernardo O’Higgins and William Brown, but they might tend to think of these as exceptions,” he says.
“In fact, there is a long history of Irish emigration to South America, Mexico and the Caribbean stretching back to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Many of the Irish who ended up in Argentina and Uruguay came in the middle of the nineteenth century.
"But there were a lot of Irish settling in South America during the 1700s. Most of these Irish families had initially emigrated to Spain, having been forced to leave Ireland because of the Penal Laws.”
Cadiz and Seville, for example, seemed to have a thriving Irish business community which opened the way to South American exploits.
The machinations of the Spanish court led Richard Wall, the son of an Irish emigrant from Kilmallock, to the role of prime minister.
According to Fanning, Wall, a complex man, was an example of Irish emigrants who had been denied opportunities at home because of their religion, and as a result were fiercely ambitious to succeed.
“The Spanish monarchs welcomed the Irish as religious refugees and recognised their talents as soldiers,” he says.
And so we have Alexander O’Reilly, from Moylagh in Co Meath who completely modernised the Spanish Army and became governor of Spanish Louisiana, and Ambrose O’Higgins from Ballynary in Co Sligo who became the Viceroy of Peru, the most powerful man in South America.
While priests and missionaries were certainly among the first Irishmen to descend on the continent, the book illustrates that even though a shared religion meant the Irish were quick to assimilate, many of those who made the trek to the southern hemisphere were interested in trade and expansion, the personal and political.
Buenos Aires, in particular, seems to have been a hotbed of intrigue, not least during the time of Ennis-born Thomas O’Gorman. His story is almost worthy of a South American soap opera, and he wasn’t alone.
There’s Peter Campbell, an outlaw figure who went gaucho, James Florence Bourke, the rascal spy, and the triple-barrelled duo of Daniel Florence O’Leary and Francis Burdett O’Connor, conscientious military men fighting for the almost mythical Simon Bolivar.
That some of the figures in the book were not born in Ireland, but carried a sense of their Irish heritage with them throughout their lifetimes, simply highlights the pull of the old country even as they were forging new ones.
Fanning gives one example: “Bernardo O’Higgins was born in Chile to an Irish father who treated him horrendously, but he always regarded himself as half-Irish. One of the main purposes of writing this book was to generate more awareness of the contribution made by Irish men and women to the creation of modern Latin America.”
It wasn’t all fame and glory, however. Paisanos depicts the sharp contrast between the riches promised on recruitment pamphlets handed out in Dublin, and the fetid squalor of the reality that met many of the men, women and children who had trekked across the Atlantic. In some cases they were wronged; in other instances, the Irish arrivistes were involved in wrongdoing.
“There is no doubt that some Irish made their fortunes in the slave trade and owned plantations in the Caribbean reliant on slave labour,” says Fanning.
“There were undoubtedly opportunistic Irish merchants working in Latin America and the likes of John Devereux, who recruited poor Irishmen to fight for the Irish Legion by promising them wealth and land which simply did not exist.
!However, there were also Irish soldiers like Daniel O’Leary and Francis O’Connor who were genuinely motivated by idealism.
In more recent years, Irish missionaries have done incredible work in Latin America often earning themselves the enmity of both church and state in the process.
“Some of the Irish officers were adventurers on the make, others were romantics. Some were there for the money, others genuinely believed in Latin American independence and saw parallels with colonialism in Ireland.”
The story didn’t end there either, what with plans for a ‘New Erin’.
“After independence, a new wave of Irish emigrants, mainly farmers from Offaly, Longford and Westmeath, settled in Argentina and Uruguay,” Fanning explains.
“The Lynch family were particularly prominent in Argentina, one of its most famous sons being Che Guevara. More recently, in the twentieth century, Irish missionaries have worked with the disadvantaged in impoverished communities throughout South America.”
A riveting read, Paisanos offers a fascinating overview of a time and place that seems so far away, and yet with each page, the distance between Cork and Concepción seems to get ever more narrow.
