Hogan (Dilloughery), Austin (1906–74), trade unionist and communist, was born 22 May 1906 in Bogberry, Ennistymon, Co. Clare, fourth son among numerous children of Michael Dilloughery, native of Co. Clare, RIC pensioner (sergeant, reduced to constable), and Bridget Dilloughery (née Stack), from Co. Cork. Moving with the family to Cork city at age 3, he was educated at North Monastery CBS and Crawford Municipal Technical Institute. Despite his father's fierce disapproval, he followed his older brothers into the republican movement, enlisting in Na Fianna Éireann while still a student during the civil war. Emigrating to New York city (1925), he worked at various day jobs while studying engineering at nights at Cooper Union; receiving his degree in 1928, he then worked as a civil engineer with various firms primarily in the New York area. During a visit to Ireland (1932) he read the works of James Connolly (qv), which galvanised his longstanding concern with social injustice. Returning to New York, he joined both the leftist Irish Workers' Club and the Communist Party (CP). To safeguard his engineering job he assumed the pseudonym ‘Hogan’ for his political work, officially changing his name at a later date (claims made to interviewers that this was his mother's maiden name are not corroborated by data on his birth registration). Assigned in mid 1933 to a CP organising drive among New York transit workers, he was a founder, with Michael J. Quill (qv) and others, of the Transport Workers Union (TWU). His background proved an invaluable basis of liaison between the CP and the recent Irish émigrés composing half the city's transit workforce, and with Quill's group of Irish republican veterans turned union organisers. In 1935 he left engineering to work full-time as TWU general organiser. After impressive TWU successes in union representation elections and contract negotiations, he was elected president of Local 100 (December 1937), covering the entire New York area transit industry. Under Quill, the TWU president, he was part of the inner coterie directing union affairs, resisting efforts by catholic conservative and anti-communist groups to oust him from office. After unification of the New York subway system under municipal ownership, he was prominent in battles to secure TWU public-sector bargaining rights.
A highly competent organiser and administrator, and an effective public speaker, Hogan, despite never having been a transit worker, commanded wide respect, was popular with the rank-and-file, and was acknowledged leader of the union's leftist militants. Tall, handsome, and reserved in manner, erudite and worldly, he had a fine singing voice and an interest in grand opera. In 1940 he was elected vice-president of the communist-dominated Greater New York Industrial Council, the local executive of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). A US Army engineer in the second world war (1942–5), he rose to the rank of captain and was severely wounded in the Pacific theatre. Despite CP opposition to any increase in New York's five-cent subway fare, Hogan initially supported a plan to link a fare rise to a substantial union wage demand, and lobbied politicians for enabling legislation (1947–8). When positions hardened and Quill moved stridently to suppress communist influence in the union, Hogan led CP loyalists in a bitter power struggle. Challenging Quill for the TWU presidency, he was decisively defeated at the December 1948 convention. In a January 1949 special election he lost office as Local 100 president. Resuming his engineering career, he worked in California and Florida, retiring to Ireland in poor health (c.1968). Returning to New York at TWU invitation, he was greeted with a welcoming reception (1972). Hogan was married; his wife predeceased him. He spent his last months in Cork, where he died on 26 December 1974.