From One Bright Island Flown
Irish Rebels, Exiles and Martyrs in Latin America
by Tomas Mac Siomoin
Nuascealta, £7.30

THE defeat of the Gaelic Irish, supported by Spanish forces, at the battle of Kinsale in 1601, was the final blow in the English conquest of Ireland and a watershed in Irish history.

Following this, a great number of the aristocratic and military leaders of Gaelic Ireland fled the country to escape criminalisation by the colonising English.

This brought with it the rapid decline of the Gaelic society and culture, eventually leading to the near destruction of the Irish language.

Tomas Mac Siomoin writes about those who went, via France and Spain, to Latin America and there became heroes in their own right.

Typically, they initially went to Spain to study, work or join distinct military units in the Spanish army. Some travelled on to Spanish colonies in South America as administrators, business people, military men.

Frequently, as they integrated and settled in their new homelands, they became involved in the fight for independence from the Spanish crown.

Mac Siomoin concentrates on six of these colourful lives.

Liam Lamport was born in Wexford in 1615, later became Guillen Lampart in Mexico, and wound up intriguingly as the inspiration behind Zorro, the fox.

He is the only non-Mexican represented in statue at Mexico City’s Angel de la Independencia.

Alejandro O’Reilly, too, has left a mark in present day Latin America — a street in Havana, Cuba, is named after him.

His family fled the notorious penal laws and took him to Spain as a child. A military man, he was sent to Cuba by the Spanish crown in 1763, and from there continued his service to the Spanish monarch in Puerto Rico and Louisiana and back to Cuba and then Spain.

Camila O’Gorman, on the other hand, was born in Argentina but suffered the same Catholic prejudice against free-spirited women as so many women have done in Ireland.

Aged 20 and eight months pregnant she was summarily executed — together with her lover the priest Ladislao Gutierrez — on direct orders from the dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas for offending Catholic morality.

There is also a group portrait of the  St Patrick’s Battalion. Their deeds for Mexican independence are commemorated on a plaque in Mexico City for giving “their lives to the Mexican cause in the United States” in the defence of Mexico against the US invasion of 1847.”

While Eduardo Bulfin returned to Ireland only to take part in the Easter Rising and was only saved from the English firing squad by his Argentinian passport.

Last but not least is the story of Rodolfo Walsh an Argentine-Irishman considered to be the father of investigative journalism.

In 1960 he helped establish of Prensa Latina in revolutionary Havana, Cuba and decrypted a CIA telex referring to the upcoming Bay of Pigs invasion, helping Fidel Castro to prepare the defences.

Walsh was killed in an armed confrontation with a military patrol on the streets of Buenos Aires in March 1977 during the Videla dictatorship.

Karen Dietrich’s beautiful illustrations complete the book’s purpose to reimagine the lives of those who took their sense of rebellion to the new continent.