The Dresden Affair
The Irish and their descendants have always come together on St. Patrick’s Day, today, to celebrate in prayer, parade and party, the arrival in Ireland in 432 of St. Patrick and Christianity. Some of these festivities, such as the Fifth Avenue parade in New York, have become world famous.
The 2,000 Irish immigrants who arrived in Buenos Aires on the M.V. City of Dresden on 16 February 1889, had less than little to celebrate on St. Patrick’s Day that year. The "Dresden affair", as it was then called, became infamous and was denounced in Parliament, press and pulpit. Argentina, their "land of promise," became the land of broken promises.
Here’s what happened.
SS Dresden of the Norddeutscher Lloyd (later renamed Helius)
in Peter Newall's Union Castle Line: a Fleet History (London, 1999), p. 102
(Ambrose Greenway collection, with kind permission of Carmania Press to Peter Mulvany)
The Irish and their descendants have always come together on St. Patrick’s Day, today, to celebrate in prayer, parade and party, the arrival in Ireland in 432 of St. Patrick and Christianity. Some of these festivities, such as the Fifth Avenue parade in New York, have become world famous.
The 2,000 Irish immigrants who arrived in Buenos Aires on the M.V. City of Dresden on 16 February 1889, had less than little to celebrate on St. Patrick’s Day that year. The "Dresden affair", as it was then called, became infamous and was denounced in Parliament, press and pulpit. Argentina, their "land of promise," became the land of broken promises.
Here’s what happened.
SS Dresden of the Norddeutscher Lloyd (later renamed Helius)
in Peter Newall's Union Castle Line: a Fleet History (London, 1999), p. 102
(Ambrose Greenway collection, with kind permission of Carmania Press to Peter Mulvany)