Brian S. McBeth, Dictatorship and Politics: Intrigue, Betrayal, and Survival in Venezuela, 1908–1935 (Notre Dame IN: University of Notre Dame, 2008), pp. xiv+578, $60.00, hb.
chief benefactor in Thomas Armstrong, an Irish Protestant and one of the richest ‘Anglo ’ merchants of the era. Armstrong funnelled funds to Fahy, who bestowed them on aspirant Irish landowners. The ties between the two men illustrated Fahy’s relentless but pragmatic pursuit of methods to consolidate the Irish community and his willingness to exploit non-Catholic Irish linkages. Kelly has an interesting chapter on William Bulfin, a fine Irish author who wrote several appealing pastoral narratives about Argentina and Ireland. During the Boer War of 1899–1902 Bulfin sought to promote Irish nationalism in Argentina and published numerous vitriolic anti-imperialist tracts in The Southern Cross, his newspaper in Buenos Aires. The campaign failed, and Bulfin returned to Ireland. The writing might have attracted a wider readership were it not for Bulfin’s decision to publish in English alone, a clearly misguided tactic on his part. Bulfin’s son had a leading role in the Easter Rising of 1916, after which he faced execution. Like American-born Eamon De Valera, he escaped death because he was foreign, namely Argentinian-born. On Bulfin’s era, Kelly might have considered social and cultural change in the community more extensively. By this point, access to land had disappeared ; the Irish Argentinians were seeping into the capital ; Irish girls, once the chattels of families on remote farms, now worked in the city as chambermaids or laundresses. The Bulfin era coincided with the onset of community urbanisation, exogamy and greater assimilation. Little scope existed for Irish republicanism; instead, the moderately inclined, sober-minded Irish Argentinians appeared far more likely to join the Unión Cı́vica Radical and to become Argentinian Radicals.