Luis Duggan

Luis Jorge Duggan Ham was born in Buenos Aires on 6 March 1906 and died on 12 June 1987. Olympedia records him as a grandson of one of four Duggan brothers who left the Irish midlands and founded the wool brokers Duggan Brothers, and as a member of the Argentine polo team that won Olympic gold in 1936. Argentina's first Olympic gold in any sport had come from polo in 1924, with Arturo Kenny and Jack Nelson in the team.

The Duggans were among the great landowning families of the Irish camp. The Irish Argentine Historical Society says the brothers came from Ballymahon, Co. Longford, in 1859, and that Thomas Duggan was christened in Shrule parish on 18 November 1838; Olympedia instead says the brothers left Co. Westmeath in 1849. Edmundo Murray lists the Duggan brothers of Ballymahon among the named emigrants of the Westmeath–Longford chain, and Brian Ó Doibhlin places the family's home in the Ballymahon area. By 1888, according to Murray, the brothers owned about 65,000 hectares in Buenos Aires province. That year they set up the Sittyton Shorthorn stud on the estancia San Ramón at San Antonio de Areco; Thomas died in 1913. The railway station named Duggan lies in the same partido: the Society dates its opening to 25 May 1882, while Ó Doibhlin says Tomás Duggan sold the land to the railway in 1896. Nally attended a cattle auction at San Ramón in 1991.

Those holdings were the exception. Murray estimates that only about one emigrant in ten could buy land at all, and McKenna's account of the sheep camp sets madness, murder and return migration beside such fortunes. The twentieth-century Duggan Brothers wool firm itself has not yet been researched for this site.