Museum curator Seán Brosnahan will be answering this question in his talk "Greening the South" at Māruawai Centre on Monday.
Mr Brosnahan said in the pioneer era, Irish Catholics were at the "bottom of the list" of desirable immigrants, compared to the Presbyterian Scottish.
"[The Irish] came from a peasant background, they were often illiterate, a lot of them were Irish-speaking," he explained.
"So they faced some real uphill challenges in prospering in an Anglo-Celtic settlement like Otago."
The curator was interested in how, despite those odds, the unwelcome visitors were able to move from Galway to Otago in a steady stream and later flourish in the gold rushes of the 1860s.
"Quite a few of the Irishmen did well at the gold fields and invested their money and land in Southland," he said.
The Irish, he said, featured "disproportionately" in the indices of social failure in that they were the poorest and most incarcerated — in asylums or prisons — but quickly assimilated with their fellow settlers, rising to their socio-economic level.
"It’s quite a remarkable story, actually, so that’s what I’m foreshadowing."
Mr Brosnahan spoke of the indemnity caused by the 16th century religious reformation, in which Scotland became Presbyterian, Ireland remained Catholic and the Presbyterians later supplanted the native Irish in the North, creating the ongoing bitterness known as "The Troubles" that endured to this day.
He said despite this, the settlers were able to get on "broadly speaking" and together build the foundation of the South.
One of Southland’s most famous writers Dan Davin, born in Invercargill, was a product of the migration chain as the author’s parents were part of the Irish Catholic community from Galway.
The curator’s own grandfather was a descendant of Irish pioneer settlers, who found gold and invested it in Southland.
He said understanding your own genealogy helps people have a deeper appreciation for what their ancestors had to overcome.
"The more you know about the past, the more you can appreciate where we are and how we got here," he said.
