Places of Origin
Counties and Birthplaces

An estimated number of 70,000 Irish-born people emigrated to Latin America up to the 1930s. Among them, about 50,000 selected Argentina as their initial destination. Analysing the origins in Ireland of the emigrants to Argentina provides their geographic profile.

Demographic Profiles of the Irish Settlers in Argentina

The source database used to build the list of Irish Settlers in Argentina allows some demographic analysis, which will be summarily described below. Since the database is not a representative sample of the universe of immigrants, the results of this analysis should not be extrapolated to the entire population of Irish emigrants to Argentina. Such a procedure would generate invalid assumptions. During the nineteenth century, forty to forty-five thousand Irish emigrants arrived in Argentina, and it is estimated that about twenty thousand of them settled in the country, while the others re-emigrated to North America, Australia, Ireland, or other destinations. Among the twenty thousand settlers, ten to fifteen thousand died without issue or broke their links to the local Irish community. Therefore, the nucleus of the Irish-Argentine community was developed with only four to five thousand settlers. 'While Coghlan records cover about 15-20% of the total estimated Irish emigration, it is not a random sample of the emigrants who originally left Ireland for Argentina in the nineteenth century, many of them only settling there for a short period before moving elsewhere in the Americas' [McKenna 1994, op. cit.]. Hence, the following demographic analysis is valid for this segment only.

The Society for Irish Latin American Studies