Find her and kill her

The cross at St Augustine’s Well at the edge of Lough Atalia in Galway City – picture taken on Saturday morning.

Among other things, Fr Anthony Fahy had a reputation as a matchmaker, a role he probably didn’t anticipate when he arrived in Buenos Aires to take up his role as Chaplain of the Irish congregation in Argentina on January 11th, 1844. He spent the next 27 years traveling around Argentina ministering to his congregation – a congregation that he helped populate through encouraging people back home to emigrate to Argentina [at a time when the Famine and its aftermath was causing huge hardship in Ireland]. In 1855, he wrote :-

Would to God that Irish emigrants would come to this country, instead of going to the United States. Here they would feel at home, they would have plenty employment and experience a sympathy from the natives very different from what now drives too many of them from the States back to Ireland. There is not a finer country in the world for a poor man to come to, especially with a family. Vast plains lying idle for want of hands to cultivate them and where the government offers every protection and encouragement to the foreigner’

When there were not enough women of marriageable age for the young Irish  farmers that had arrived in Argentina, Fr Fahy arranged for young women from his home town of Loughrea, in east Galway, to emigrate too. Fr Fahy is buried in the same cemetery in Buenos Aires (the famous and frankly bizarre Recoleta cemetery) as his good friend  Admiral William Brown, a Mayoman and founder of the Argentine navy.

However, there were some relationships that Fr. Fahy did not approve of, at all. When a young Argentine society lady of Irish descent, Camila O’Gorman, ran off with a priest from Buenos Aires named Ladislao Gutiérrez, it scandalized society there. Argentina was ruled as separate provinces at the time, and Fr Fahy was an ally of the Buenos Aires governor, Juan Manuel de Rosas.

Fr. Fahy, amongst others,

demanded an exemplary punishment of the wayward daughter that was also giving the industrious and well-regarded [Irish] community a bad name.

He got his wish. When the  location of the lovers was betrayed by another Irish priest, Fr Michael Gannon, they were brought back to Buenos Aires. Camila was 8 months pregnant and just twenty years old. On the orders of the governor, both she and Ladislao were executed by firing squad 162 years ago on this day.