The murder of Crossmaglen stalwart James Hughes in December left his club and his community reeling. His best friend Oisín McConville recalls a player who 'belonged to everybody,' writes MALACHY CLERKIN

THERE’S NO real beginning. When you’re friends for life, that’s how it goes, isn’t it? The beginning is like Atlantis – you know it must have happened, but you’re damned if you can tell when or where or how. Oisín McConville was 10 months older than James Hughes and, as far back as he can remember, he was just there.

They were just there together, Crossmaglen to their toenails. Went to the same school, played in the same teams, weaved through each other’s lives like yarn in a rope.

The older they got, the tighter they got. McConville is godfather to Tiarnan, one of Hughes’s three boys. Hughes liked to slag McConville’s wife Darina about the couple’s imminent arrival, telling her that no matter what name she has picked out, she’d only have to see the child once before settling on James.

As footballers, McConville was county and Hughes was club, but the distinction was only ever a passing one, observed on the pitch and nowhere else. Even McConville’s Armagh team-mates said they were like Bill and Ben. You rarely found one but you found the other.

“The thing that hasn’t really kicked in with me yet,” says McConville, “is that this week in particular would be when I’d hear from him most. He’d ring me on a Monday before a big game and go, ‘Well, how’s things looking for the weekend?’ And then he’d ring me on Tuesday again and ask how training went on Monday.

“And then he’d call out to the house to me one of the evenings and I’d be saying to him, ‘James, I’m not talking football with you.’ I’d be trying to forget about it until the weekend. But it never really mattered. He talked football and that was it.”

On a Saturday night two weeks before Christmas, James Hughes was shot dead as he sat in the front seat of a taxi in the Lis na Mara housing estate in Dundalk.

The gunman was 32-year-old Shane Rogers, an ex-boyfriend of Trish Byrne, who was also in the taxi and who was injured in the attack.

Just over a week later, Rogers – who had handed himself into the Garda and was said to be wracked with remorse over what he’d done – was found dead in his cell at Cloverhill courthouse. There was no aspect of it that wasn’t horrific.

Crossmaglen never saw a bigger funeral. The news reports all said he was a great club servant, but in a way it sounded like too small a tag for him, the kind of thing they say about every man who ends his days with a jersey draped across the coffin.

“The thing I keep saying,” says McConville, “is that if he was at any other club in the country, there’d be a statue erected of him outside the clubhouse. This was a man who had 13 county medals, he had six Ulster championships, three All-Irelands.

“He was just consumed by the club. He’d always make sure he was the first person you’d see at a match. You’d spot him out the window of the bus or just as you walked to the dressingroom. And then he’d be the first one you’d see afterwards as well.

“He was just a constant, one of those people who was always there. He used to tell his three boys that he didn’t care that they were living in Keady – they’d still be playing for Cross when they grew up.”

James Hughes was a spring-heeled corner forward, pacy and buzzy and hardy with it. From his teenage years to the day he died at the age of 35, he never weighed much more than 10 stone. He was your typical summer club footballer, the kind of player who’d light up a county league game on a hazy Saturday evening. Left-footed – and heavily so – he was the quickest man in the Cross panel for years.

He had his days. McConville points to the county final in 2001 when he pretty much robbed Hughes of the man of the match award. “I scored 2-6 but he laid the first goal on a plate for me, he got fouled for a penalty for the other goal and he was involved in at least two or three of the other scores. He never stopped telling me for years afterwards that he should have got it.”

But he was a club player, no more and no less. When the nights got darker and the county players came back, he was invariably the first man overboard.

He was a top-of-the-ground sort and the heavier it got, the easier he was to stop. He played a huge amount of league games and did his bit in the Armagh championship too, but once Cross moved on to Ulster and the All-Ireland series, he usually got pulled.

“There was often times when he would play right the way through the league and then six or seven lads came back from county duty and he got put to one side. He was just of that nature that he was prepared to do that job. He was saying, ‘Look I’ll do whatever I can do to help.’ Don’t get me wrong, he would have been pissed off about not playing. He was only human.

“Sometimes I thought he got a raw deal because in a way it was easy to drop him. Because he was of that nature that he wasn’t going to huff, because he’d say straight out, ‘I don’t care if I’m dropped, I’ll still be the first man at training.’ That was exactly the way he was and I thought that made him easy to drop.

“Managers knew he wasn’t going to storm out or rise a row or be waiting for them at their car after training demanding to know why he wasn’t playing. He probably suffered because of the good nature he had.”

Hughes finished up playing with the seniors after the All- Ireland win in 2007 but he moved on to captain the reserves and his life continued to be a satellite spinning in orbit around the club. He worked as a plasterer, but as the whole show ground to a halt over the past few years he started doing a few odds and ends on the farm belonging to midfielder Johnny Hanratty’s father. By neither trade nor inclination was he a farmer but they loved having him there – he was mad for work and he was fun above all else. Except when Cross had a game coming up.

“Johnny’s brother told me that you’d swear he was still playing the week of a big game,” McConville laughs. “He’d get ratty and be in bad form, wondering what if this or what if that. He’d ring me the morning of a match and one thing he’d always say would be, ‘Bag one for me today.’ Then as the years went on, he had three boys and he’d go, ‘Bag one for the boys as well.’ And I’d be saying, ‘Jesus, not one for each of them and you as well? I’m 36 now and I’ll hardly get four goals in a season never mind in a match.”

When Cross beat Burren in late November to take their ninth Ulster club title, Hughes made sure he found McConville (who’d managed to bag only the one that day) to get him to pose for photos with Tiarnan and Darragh.

“But he wouldn’t stand into the picture himself. He wanted them to be in the photo. He wanted people to take photos of them and me. That was James to a tee.”

A fortnight later, James Hughes was gone. McConville was up early enough for a Sunday because himself and Darina were going to do some Christmas shopping. He got out of the shower to find a missed call from his brother Seán. Darina said straight away something must have happened – Seán wouldn’t ring at half nine on a Sunday morning for a chat.

“I rang him back and asked what was up and he just said, ‘It’s wee James. Wee James is dead.’ Now James’s father is called James too, so I thought that’s who he meant but he said no, it was James, our James.

“I didn’t cry straight away. I didn’t say anything. I just got back into bed and pulled the covers up over my head. Darina said, ‘What’s wrong? What’s wrong?’ And I told her. I took a minute and then rang Seán back to see what the story was, what happened like. He said: ‘He was shot.’ And I went, ‘Shot? James is the last person in the world who would ever be shot.’

“It started to sink in. Your emotions are all over the place, you don’t know what to do. I was sort of sitting there still dripping wet and I was wondering, ‘What the f**k do I do here? What do I do?’

“The phonecalls started to come in then. Aaron rang me, Aaron Kernan. I couldn’t make out a word he was saying, he was crying that hard down the phone. John McEntee rang me in the same state, crying down the phone, saying, ‘What are we going to do?’ Then I started crying for the first time and I’d say I cried nonstop for about an half an hour. The phone kept ringing but I just left it to one side and ignored it. After a while, Darina and I said we’d have to get ourselves together and go to the house.”

It took a few days for the body to be released so the wake lasted longer than usual. Everyone came and they came from everywhere. Crossmaglen people, Armagh people, Ulster people, Irish people. For the past few years, McConville has been driving around the country giving talks about overcoming gambling and Hughes often went with him to keep him company. Every once in a while, Hughes would mention a call he got from so-and-so in Ballincollig or Ballintubber and McConville wouldn’t have a clue who he was talking about. It would turn out to be somebody Hughes met at one of those talks whose number he kept. That was how he was. He made friends easily and made an effort to keep them.

“A lot of the wake was almost jovial at times because we had so many stories,” McConville says. “And everybody had so many stories. There were so many people there who you hadn’t seen in years coming to visit. It was a crowd of boys together and it was no-holds-barred sort of stuff. It all came out.

“But it was a rough time. It hit me every so often during that week. It got me at really bad times and this sadness would hit. I’d jump in the car and go home for half an hour to deal with it. Darina would be at home and we’d sit and chat and I’d cry for a while. Then you’d get yourself together and go back to the house to see was there anything you could do for them. Not that there was that much you could do because everybody in the community rallied around.

“A lot of people were very proud of the community that weekend. We don’t live in each other’s pockets in Cross even though people probably look at us and go, ‘Here comes these monsters from Cross down to win another county title.’ Like that’s all we want to do, like we’re psychos or something. But it’s not like that. It wasn’t like that that week because everybody just came together and just mixed in. Everybody wanted to be there for the right reasons, to do the right things, to help the family.”

The funeral was on the Friday. The family asked McConville if he’d say something at the mass, maybe read a poem from the altar. He decided he’d try to write something, so himself and John McEntee sat down on the Wednesday and came up with a eulogy. The last thing Hughes had said to him was that he loved him. They called their love letter back ‘Our Friend James’.

“It was something I wanted to do and I didn’t want to do, if that makes any sense. I wanted to do it because they wanted me to do it. And I wanted to do it because he would probably have wanted me to do it. But I didn’t want to do it because it wasn’t about me. I didn’t want it to be, ‘Well, this is what I think.’ I wanted it to be, ‘This is what needs to be said about him.’ It didn’t matter who read it.”

Christmas came and went but the whole town was walking in treacle for most of it. McConville had days when he was just about okay and days when he ached. He spent the whole of Stephen’s Day under the blackest cloud, raging against the gunman, wondering what could have been done, what tiny detail of anyone’s day could have gone differently to change the outcome. “Just a shitty day. I went then and had a few drinks and obviously that just made it 10 times worse.”

But eventually he got up and got on. He visits the grave three or four times a week and always leaves it feeling lifted. He counts himself lucky that Darina was close to James as well because it means they can both talk about missing him to someone who gets it and isn’t just nodding along.

“In a way, too, I’m lucky that I’ve been through my own stuff and I realise the importance of not shutting off. I’d be very conscious of that all the time and I try to let it out as much as I can.”

As for Cross, today they invite the spotlight back upon themselves for the first time since the funeral. In a week like this, Hughes would have spoken to just about every person in the club.

He’d have asked every player if they were fit, if their head was right, if they were ready. He’d have sorted somebody out with a lift to Portlaoise, given somebody else directions. And he’d have plagued McConville all week asking about it.

“He will be in the back of everybody’s mind, we know that. But the two boys – Tony [McEntee] and Gareth [O’Neill] addressed it early on and said, ‘Yeah, we will be doing this for James, but we don’t need to mention that every night.’ We all know that there’s somebody up there who’s looking after us. That doesn’t need to be brought up all the time. I throw him into the mix at training but it’s never like, ‘We have to do this well for James.’ It’s more jokey than that.

“Like, James had the pointiest f**king elbows of anyone I ever played with or against, and if he was tackling you, you’d get it in the ribs or even in the jaw and you’d know all about it.

“So if you were taking the piss out of him before training or during it, he’d hold it up at you and go, ‘Any more of your shite and you’ll get the pointy fella.’ That’s the kind of thing I’d throw into training now. ‘Right lads, any more messing and you’ll get the pointy fella’. Everyone would know what you were saying.

“There’s very few conversations you have now without him coming into it in some way. I think that’s a great thing. I think for a lot of years, we all thought that the best way to deal with death was to never mention it again. Whereas I think now, it’s a very healthy thing that his name is still mentioned. It helps in that we’re not brushing it under the carpet. It happened and it affected everybody. He belonged to everybody.”

Maybe so, but not everybody had an equal share. James Hughes was a good man and he had a best friend. One who’s doing better day by day, working his way through a loss that makes no sense.