Archdeacon Dillon succeeded Father Fahy as Irish chaplain in Buenos Ayres, and, although by birth and education an Irishman, he became one of the principal dignitaries of the archdiocese.  He was for some time professor of theology in the ecclesiastical seminary of Buenos Ayres, and accompanied Archbishop Escalada as theologian to the Vatican Council in 1869.  He was the founder of the Southern Cross in 1874, the Irish weekly paper which is now so ably edited by the gifted Irishman, Mr. Gerald Foley.

The first daily paper to appear in English in South America was the Standard, founded in 1861 by Michael G. Mulhall, the distinguished statistician, and it is still one of the leading papers in the country.  In conducting it Michael G. Mulhall was joined by his brother, Edward T. Mulhall, in 1862, and for many years it was continuously under their care.  The Standard still remains in the Mulhall family, and has for its editor a cousin of the former editor’s, Mr. John Mulhall, who wisely directs its course.  The Argentina, an important paper in Spanish, was founded a few years since by Edward T. Mulhall, Jr., a brilliant son of the late Edward Mulhall of the Standard.  The Hyberno-Argentine Review, a new Irish weekly, is edited by another able Irishman, James B. Sheridan.  In Rio Janeiro the Anglo-Brasilian Times was founded in 1864 by an Irishman, Mr. Scully, who also wrote an important book on Brazil.

Ireland had also its representatives in South American diplomacy and the making of treaties.  As early as 1809 Colonel James Burke was sent by Lord Strangford, British minister at Rio, on a confidential mission to Buenos Ayres to negotiate the establishment of a separate kingdom on the river Plate, with the Princess Charlotte as queen.  In 1867 Mr. Gould, an Irishman, British charge d’affaires, endeavored to mediate between the allies, Brazil and Argentina, and President Lopez of Paraguay, but without success.  Stephen H. Sullivan, British charge d’affaires for Chile, signed the treaty of commerce and navigation between England and Chile on the 10th of May, 1852.  He was afterwards appointed British minister at Lima, where he was murdered.  The late Chilian ministers to Buenos Ayres and London, William Blest Gana and Albert Blest Gana, were the sons of an Irish Doctor Blest from Sligo, who settled in Chile.  In 1859 George Fagan signed a treaty with General Guido for compensation of losses to British subjects during the civil wars after the Independence.

The mining industry had among its pioneers brave sons of Erin.  J. O. French went to Buenos Ayres in 1826, and after an arduous mountain journey arrived at the foot of the Cerro Morado, where he found auriferous ores.  Chevalier Edmond Temple, an Irish gentleman who had served in Spain in a dragoon regiment, also landed in Buenos Ayres in 1826, and started across the Pampas, then almost uninhabited, until he came to the mountainous country where the Potosi mines were situated.  In one of the defiles he lost his favorite horse, and in his book he bids a touching farewell to the friendly steed which had shared with him so many toils and dangers.  Temple’s successor in the Argentine mining provinces was Major Rickard Seaver, a member of an old Co.  Dublin family.