Clogher Historical Society has added an extra event to its programme for 2009 - one for your diary.

Professor Scott Molloy, visiting from the University of Rhode Island, will address the Society on his recent book, Irish Titan, Irish Toilers: Joseph Banigan and Nineteenth-Century New England Labor. This event will take place on Monday 7 September at 8pm in Carrickmacross Workhouse.

Banigan, born in 1839, emigrated with his family from the Shirley Estate in Carrickmacross and by the age of twenty five was managing the Woonsocket Rubber Company in Rhode Island. He eventually became one of the most successful Irish-American businessmen in the United States.

“From the ‘Bannikan’ cabin in county Monaghan to the Banigan mansion in Wayland Square, Providence, Scott Molloy uses Joseph Banigan's story and the Woonsocket Rubber Company as sounding boards for the story of Irish immigration into this nineteenth-century cauldron of political struggle and labor resistance. His authority and scholarship as a labor historian is, if anything, enhanced by the book’s racy, action-packed narrative of riots, strikes, ethnic prejudice, political chicanery, enterprise, initiative, and above all, in the end, American success and achievement. It's a story well told and well worth the reading.” — Professor Patrick Duffy, National University of Ireland, Maynooth

Scott Molloy is an award-winning Professor at the Labor Research Center, University of Rhode Island. He previously drove a bus, was a union activist, and was Chief of Staff to a United States Congresswoman.