The Correspondence of Fr Matthew Gaughren OMI (1888-1890)

Abstract

In mid-1888, Fr Matthew Gaughren (1843-1914) was sent to Argentina by his superior, the O.M.I. provincial in Great Britain, on a “begging expedition”, which aimed at collecting money among the Irish settlers to lessen the debt upon the church of Our Lady of Grace at Tower Hill. However, Gaughren changed the priorities of his mission in South America and appealed to the English-speaking community to support the Irish immigrants who arrived in Buenos Aires in February 1889 on the Dresden steamer ship from Cork and were sent to an ill-fated Irish Colony in Napostá, near the port of Bahía Blanca. His thinking and his struggle are revealed in the following letters, collected from various archival sources, which are now being published, most of them for the first time, in their complete form.

Keywords

• fr matthew gaughren
• dresden
• letters
• ireland
• immigration