It is truly amazing: communities that managed to retain their Irish identity after four, five or more generations abroad, draw a sharp line after the effective independence of the country and fast-forward to The Troubles, a political development that can be nicely fitted in the old fairy tale. More amazing still, the ones that can actually tell the fairy tale are the relatively few who bothered at all to learn some Irish history. It seems that that is all they manage to retain. Why?

Argentina must be a special case of denial, with a community that has some difficulty remembering even the Easter Rebellion. To start to understand this peculiar development, one has to bear in mind that Irish Argentines are the only ones in the Diaspora that didn't settle in an English-speaking country. There is of course some tiny Irish presence almost anywhere, like the 3,000 Brazilian Irish and a few hundred Chileans of Irish descent. But Argentina's is clearly the largest community outside of the US, Canada, Australia, South Africa and of course Britain.

When emigration to Argentina became important, in the second half of the nineteenth century, the Irish found a country fast becoming part of the imperial sphere of influence. Development was fueled by British capital and know-how, and being Irish became a competitive advantage over the natives. English-speaking and legally British subjects, the Irish in Argentina behaved mostly as one more variety of Britons, good subjects that happened to be Catholic and have a brogue. A familiar type for people of my generation were the thoroughly anglicized, five o'clock-tea aunts that spoke --or tried to-- the King's English.

The Irish kept their distance from local politics until the 50s and 60s of the past century, when their children entered the lunatic fringe with gusto by joining groups such as Tacuara where Baxter, Lynch and Nell plotted revolution and robbed armored cars. But the founding experience of the community was getting consular protection to avoid being drafted and serve in the Paraguayan war in the 1860s. The first generation was so reluctant to become Argentine that it attracted the ire of President Sarmiento, who wrote article after article damning the Irish as ungrateful.

Community political life in regard to Ireland wasn't that much different. The Irish spent time and treasure building an extensive network of churches, hospitals and schools, started a newspaper – still published as a monthly and the second-oldest in the country – and gradually became more and more Argentine. It would be a matter of interest to know the history of how the Irish here and the Irish Argentines digested the rise of modern nationalism in Ireland, from Parnell – another virtual unknown among locals – to De Valera. Edmundo Murray points the way in the epilogue to his recent "Devenir Irlandés", where he writes of the Irish learning to love Argentina and at the same time learning to see an enemy in Britain.

What is known is that there was a measure of excitement in the years between Easter and the Civil War, when Ireland had a clandestine rebel government. An Irish mission came to Argentina to raise funds and did sell some Irish Republican Bonds, but not many. The last echo of that period is the habit of hanging reproductions of the Independence Proclamation at home, a souvenir as popular with Irish Argentines as it is with Irish Americans.

Curiously enough, there is something deeply Argentine in that attitude. Faced with mass immigration on a scale relative to the population never seen even in New York, Argentina reacted in the late nineteenth century with a thorough and successful program of Argentinization based on a school curriculum that stressed nationality to grotesque extremes. Immigrants were tacitly told to leave their politics at home: Argentina offered a fresh start but the price was to cease being active citizens of their home countries. There were exceptions, of course, notably Italian anarchists who didn't see any reasons to drop their internationalist socialism, and the flare of emotions detonated in the Thirties by the Spanish Civil War. But all in all, there was a thorough process of depolitization that severed ties with Europe.