Ten years after Bishop Griffith’s appointment, Pius IX. separated Natal and the eastern districts of Cape Colony from Cape Town, and erected the Eastern Vicariate Apostolic.  Once more an Irish prelate was the first Bishop—­Aidan Devereux, who was consecrated by Bishop Griffith at Cape Town in the Christmas week of 1847.  The great emigration from Ireland had now begun, and a stream of immigrants was arriving at the Cape.  Bishop Devereux fixed his residence at Port Elizabeth, and of his four successors up to the present day three have been Irish.  Bishop Moran, who went out to Port Elizabeth in 1854, was consecrated at Carlow in Ireland by Archbishop (afterwards Cardinal) Cullen.  The third Vicar Apostolic was Bishop Ricards, and the present bishop is another Irishman, Dr. Hugh McSherry, who received his consecration from the hands of Cardinal Logue in St. Patrick’s Cathedral at Armagh.

Until the discovery of the diamond deposits in what is now the Kimberley district, some forty years ago, the Irish immigrants had chiefly settled in the ports and along the coast.  But among the crowds who went to seek their fortunes at the diamond fields were large numbers of adventurous Irishmen.  The mission church established at Kimberley became the centre of a new bishopric in 1886, when the Vicariate of Kimberley, which for some time included the Orange Free State, was established, and an Irish Oblate, Father Anthony Gaughran, was appointed its first bishop.  He was succeeded in 1901 by his namesake and fellow countryman, the present Bishop Matthew Gaughran.

The gold discoveries on the Witwatersrand about Johannesburg produced another rush into the interior in the days after the first Transvaal war.  A great city of foreign immigrants—­the “Uitlanders”—­grew up rapidly on the upland, where a few months before there had been only a few scattered Boer farms.  Irishmen from Cape Colony and Natal, from Ireland itself, and from the United States formed a large element in the local mining and trading community.  They were mostly workers.  Few of them found their way into the controlling financier class, which was largely Jewish.  The Irish were better out of this circle of international gamblers, whose intrigues finally produced the terrible two years’ bloodshed of the great South African war.  Many engineers of the mines were Irish-Americans.  Huge consignments of mining machinery arrived from the United States, and many of the engineers who came to fit it up remained in the employ of the mining companies.  Until after the war, the Transvaal and Johannesburg had depended ecclesiastically on the Vicar Apostolic of Natal, but in 1904 a Transvaal Vicariate was erected, and once more the first bishop was an Irishman, Dr. William Miller, O.M.I.