John Hughes passes on his love for sport
John Hughes told Gerry McLaughlin about school, sport and Geevagh’s past
BIG JOHN! There will never be anything beag about one John Hughes. He’s the John Wayne of his beloved Geevagh, home of the long-stepping fir fada, the mountainy men from a place where memory is sacred and the GAA is the tie that binds this tight-knit community on the Sligo-Roscommon border. John has teaching in the blood and is the third generation of national teachers in his clan and he is very proud of the fact that his son Pat Hughes, a current Sligo GAA star, is the fourth generation.
John has played for Sligo Senior footballers, too. He is principal at Geevagh National School and he has taught his children well, a warm fatherly figure who is always searching for the gift or spark that enriches a child.
We are all different with different abilities and tastes and the really good teachers always try to enrich their pupils’ lives and make them feel valued and wanted.
John has encouraged all sports since coming back from Dublin in 1993 to take over as principal, and he has had success in Gaelic football, hurling, athletics and rugby.
But he was never a medal moocher, for John measures success in the ability of children to develop and grow as good people and he has always been quick to spot potential in the children under his care.
He is also a GAA legend and the driving force behind Geevagh for over 40 years as a player, coach, manager and administrator. He played top-class rugby for Clontarf for over a decade and often played Gaelic football and rugby on the same weekend, always coming back to Geevagh. In 2010 he was rightly honoured for his great achievements in the GAA when he received the President’s Award from then President Christy Cooney – no mean feat and a testament to his dedication to the GAA.
He is a great raconteur and historian with a deep voice like rich, warm wine – the voice of a natural seanchaí telling yarns at a winter fire.
Listening to him over the phone and you get the sense of a warm man who likes people, is relaxed in their company and would be very good at putting the awkward or the lonely at ease. He begins our chat with some local history about his people, those who made him the man he is today and how the first President of Ireland, Douglas Hyde, came to live in Geevagh for a while and may have written that great poem An Gleann Inár Tógadh Mé in Geevagh.
John’s mother was born and bred in Kilmactranny and lived there all her life, and she’s still going strong at 97. John said: “My granny Kathleen Smith taught out in Inishbofin off the coast of Mayo and we went out there some years ago and some of the older people remembered her.
“My mother was a boarder in the convent in Roscommon and spent a few years at teacher training college in Carysfort, and then came back to teach here. She is Elizabeth Ewing and goes as Betty.
“She taught in St James’ Well, a school here in the Geevagh parish, and then went to Highwood.
“My father, Pat Hughes, was a Mayo man from Hollymount. He came here as manager of the co-op in Kilmactranny. He stayed in lodgings in my mother’s house, and they got married in 1959.
“My mother was principal, and former Easkey Vocational School principal Gerry Donagher was one of her star pupils – she has often spoken fondly of him. He is a very bright man, a great musician and raconteur a real all- rounder and they kept a great bond of friendship. She encouraged him to go for a scholarship in Summerhill. “Both my parents had third level education as my father did dairy science in UCC.
“My mother taught me, and I taught my own three sons, and it was strange being on both sides of the fence.
“It was a totally different dynamic when they were in the classroom and then I was back as their father in the car going home.
“They were more likely to do what they were asked in school, but it was different at home!
“I was the same with my mother, but children are very flexible, and they can fit into that role.
“She taught me, and she was a great teacher, very dedicated and very organised. Nothing was left to chance. “And she has a great grasp of the Irish language to this day. Only last week we gave her a poetry book and she came to Douglas Hyde’s poem An Gleann Inár Tógadh Mé and she recited it word for word and I videoed it and I sent it to our three lads.
“Hyde was born in Dublin and mostly lived in Frenchpark, but he would have lived for a while as a boy in Kilmactranny.
“His father was the rector there and he lived in the house next door to my home. They called it the Glebe House and Douglas lived there for a few years. “In the poem he is saying an gleann inár tógadh mé, the glen where I was raised, and not inár rugadh mé, which would mean the glen where he was born.
“I am convinced he was referring to Gleann, a little valley in Kilmactranny which has a lot of history.”
John’s father was a big influence on John. He died at the age of 90 in 2015. John looked up to him all of his life. John said: “He had a great sense of justice and he had no personal fears of doing the right thing and he had the wisdom to know what that was.
“It is something that I would have hoped that I inherited from him, and he never counted the cost.
“And whatever had to be said or done he did it – he was courageous that way.”
JOHN WAS born in 1961 and just turned 60 on St Brigid’s Day. He said: “I had a very happy childhood in Kilmactranny. I was interested in all sports and we had a TV and I would be watching some different sports, and you did not get to see much GAA apart from the All-Ireland finals.
“In a small rural area, it was difficult to get people to kick the ball back to you.”
There was no GAA in the national school and John played U-12 for Geevagh and in a small area with relatively low numbers “everybody got a chance”.
He said: “There were a couple of very dedicated people who would go around and pick up lads from all the different areas. We just met up and played and the first match I had was against Gurteen, who are now amalgamated into Eastern Harps.
“We got into a divisional final and we were beaten by Eastern Harps.
“One of the main men in the club was a priest in Highwood called Fr Michael Browne and he was one of the finest men I ever met. We have been very fortunate in the priests we had in this area.
“And I don’t think I would be playing football at all only for Micheál McDonagh.
“He had such a passion for the local club. He was a plumber, and he would go around after work and pick us all up and bring us to matches and you really felt his tension on the way to games. “Whatever it was about him you always knew that it was really important to Micheál that Geevagh won. “When the match was on you would look over and Micheál would be the picture of intensity.
“I remember later on in my early 20s I was playing a lot of rugby with Clontarf and living and working in Dublin. And I was thinking of stepping back from the GAA and from travelling up and down, and I had the decision made. “But Micheál came to the house and that was enough. I could not say no to him. We are great friends.”
“There was a Noel Donagher who was a primary school teacher in Dublin, a few years older than me, and he was the Geevagh goalkeeper, and he kept coming back for games.
“He would come up and showed me how to coach in catching a ball and we used to travel up and down to Dublin and we used to train together in the Phoenix Park.”
John says he was lucky as Geevagh got to a few underage finals.
“We had a good group and won U-14,
U-16 and U-18 divisional finals and won a county minor title in 1979. This was really a big deal – we beat City Gaels in the final.
“We had a big tussle with Tourlestrane in the semi-final and they had Anthony Brennan, Shane Durkin and Tommy McVeigh and they had beaten us in the U-16 semi-final.
“We drew the first match and then we lost our captain and midfielder Gerry Jennings through injury – he broke a collar bone.
“He was out for the replay, but we had a great win over them. I was at midfield.
“I was in Summerhill as a boarder. In those years the school won a Connacht Colleges title and John Kent was outstanding.
“Gerry Emmett from Ballyfarnon was there, and he went on to play for Roscommon.
“Our U-18 county championship win in 1979 was a great victory. In the first round, two cars carrying six or seven of our lads got the dates mixed up and we had only eight players, but we had a great motivator in Fr Tom Lavin. And Dessie Kearins was also there.
“So we only had eight players against a team of 15. You need to have 13 players togged out, so Micheál McDonagh had a few primary school children stand in for a short while.
“We won the game, which gave us great confidence.
“There were big celebrations in Geevagh and this victory is still the biggest one as we have not won any senior titles, although we do have a few Intermediate titles and Division ‘B’ titles. It is the one medal that I really cherish.”
JOHN HUGHES went to St Patrick’s College in Drumcondra and had three of the best years of his life there in Dublin. He stayed in the city until 1993. John said: “We had Gabriel Cuddy of Mayo, Donal Donohoe of Cavan and Ciaran Murray of Monaghan – a friend of mine.
“In freshers we were unlucky as Ciaran broke his leg. But Mike McAuliffe from Kerry was very strong.” “Cyril Lyons was there and a great hurler and Martin Hanrick, who was a good footballer as well.
“Dublin was mighty, and I was on the bench for the Sligo Minors and Anthony Brennan was the main man, but none of our county title-winning team was picked for Sligo.”
John played senior when he was 18 and the club were in two U-21 county finals on the trot.
He said: “Gerry McManus was a great player and coach for us and has put back a lot into the club.” Meanwhile, John began his teaching career in Ballymun in 1982 and was to spend 11 further happy years in the capital.
“I thoroughly enjoyed it and we had a young, vibrant staff. It was a big change, but I had already spent three years on the Northside.
“Soccer was the main game. I coached the GAA in the school and it was like an amphitheatre as you had all the flats towering over you.
“But there was never any difficulty as the parents were just delighted to see their children out playing at all.
“It was a bit surreal. You were there surrounded by towers blocks and soccer pitches with all these enthusiastic youngsters.
“Facilities were poor, and we had three footballs which were soccer balls given to the school.
“A past pupil of our school called Paul McGee – not ‘Ski’ – was capped for Ireland and he also played for Wimbledon
when they had a really good team.”
Was John conscious of the major social problems in the area?
He said: “Yeah, you would be aware, but I suppose when you are living in Dublin for a few years, you are aware of those problems anyway. But it did not impinge on the school.
“When the youngsters turned up to school, school was something very constant and consistent in their lives. “We had an excellent staff and a great chairman of the board of management, Fr Kevin O’Rourke, a brother of ex-RTÉ man Seán O’Rourke. He was a great man for the youth.”
In tandem with teaching, John was playing top-class rugby with Clontarf. “I had some great years there. I had taken up rugby in St Pat’s.”
“There was a guy at St Pat’s called Ger Dowd from Creggs who was captain of the rugby team. He approached me and said I was a big guy and wondered if I ever played rugby.
“I said I hadn’t, but he said that won’t matter, wait until you see the fellows you will be playing with.
“We had fun, even though we hardly won a match.”
John Hughes broke his leg playing Gaelic football for Geevagh in 1983 and when he went back to Dublin, he was doing a lot of jogging on the sea front. A man from Carrick-on-Shannon who was living near him asked him to train with Clontarf RFC.
John joined and moved up the ranks quickly. He made the senior team and “thoroughly enjoyed the rugby”.
The line-out was John’s speciality. This was long before any lifting was allowed.
John said: “When you play Gaelic, and you have to go up for a ball in a forest of men you may have to adjust yourself.
“I was able to do that, and I found that guys who were playing rugby a lifetime, if the ball did not come to them in a certain way, they could not adjust themselves.
“From the GAA I could reach out with one hand and maybe flick the ball over to myself and there was a bit of technique from the GAA that I could use at set pieces and kick-offs.
“As well as that it was unusual for a forward in rugby to be able to kick the ball and it still is.”
John was second row and wore number 4, the number of Willie John Bride, the ex-Irish and Lions team captain. In Clontarf, John learned a huge amount about the organisation of sport.
He said: “Clontarf was a pretty serious team, and the club was run and organised in a very professional manner.
“I was on the senior team for about five years and in all of that time, nobody ever missed training.
“The games were played at the weekend and the teams were picked on Monday night. If you were dropped you got a phone call and if you did not get a call you were playing.
“So, when you went you went up to the club on Tuesday the first XV was there and they all trained together.” He played against all the top Irish international stars in those times because the game was still amateur. John said: “I played against the likes of Michael Kiernan, Paul Dean, Ollie Campbell, Donal Lenihan and Ciaran Fitzgerald. Neil Francis was a great second-row forward who had a great leap, and I don’t have particular fond memories of playing against him. “The beauty of rugby in those amateur days was that you could go along to your local club and watch all the international stars.
“Our best-known guy was a fellow called Fergus Dunlea who had a number of Irish caps, and we had a number of players who represented Leinster.” Rugby has changed utterly and there is a big disconnect between the clubs and the provinces.
John said: “It is sad to see, and even the atmosphere around the rugby clubs is not what it was.
“In those days, the internationals also considered themselves club men, and a lot of the current Irish team would have been associated with Clontarf – people like Cian Healy come to mind. But they never play with Clontarf, but it is a pity that you can’t see the top guys any longer. It was a real treat in the 1980s for people to go
along to the local club and see Tony Ward, Ollie Campbell or Paul Dean. “But people accepted it and got on with it. I feel myself with regards to the GAA, and I could be in a minority of one, but I think that inter-county players shouldn’t be available to play for their club in the league. Yes, in the championship.
“My reasons are that a lot of league matches might be postponed because the county might have a game. If there are county guys missing, others tend to come forward and shine.
“Coaching youngsters, I have noticed that very often when your star player is not playing, everybody else plays better, because sometimes underage players can be more intimidated by their own good players than by the opposition.
“They really stand up and shine without that factor.
“It balances one and another out in the league and you could find that if clubs have two or three county players, they will cancel each other out anyway when they meet.
“My son Pat totally disagrees with me because Pat would like to play football every day.
“But the dual player, the club and county player, is training very hard and driving long distances and then when he plays for the club, he is under pressure to be very good.
“It is very hard to be fresh in those circumstances. I remember playing rugby for Clontarf in Dublin and Gaelic football for Geevagh in Sligo in the same weekend.
“I have regularly played a rugby match in Cork or Belfast on a Saturday, drove back to Dublin on a Saturday night, and then drove down on Sunday to play with Geevagh.
“I never missed a game for Geevagh and it was very hard. I would often find myself just going through the motions. When it was a big match I would put on a bit of a spurt.
“I think it is asking too much of county men and it is enough for the championship where they need to be fresh for action.
“I think that the real benefit is that your layer of players that are just beneath the county guys will really step up and shine.
“It gives them a great opportunity.” Meanwhile, John got “a few runs’ with Sligo senior footballers in the 1980s in the National Football League. Denis Johnston was manager and Sligo had the likes of John Kent, Mick Laffey and Martin McCarrick. Martin was a great friend of John’s from their Dublin days.
MEANWHILE, John came back to Geevagh, when he got the principal’s job in the local national school in 1993. “I had done 10 or 11 years in Dublin by then and I was beginning to look around and see if I could make a move somewhere.
“Jobs were scarce. But a friend of mine said the Geevagh school was looking for a principal, which I hadn’t heard about.
“So, I applied for the job, as being a local I felt I had the chance of being called for an interview.
“I got the job and that was great. We decided to come home, and our third son Ben was born. We had three boys altogether, Cormac and Pat being the other two. My wife, Marese Monaghan from Carrick-on-Shannon, was also in a position to move west and it took us a few years to settle in.
“It was a bit of wrench as I knew the people of Clontarf almost as well as I knew the people at home.
“For the first year or so I would have moved back to Dublin in a heartbeat but once the boys got settled in school that was it.”
So was it difficult for John? Sometimes a teacher is almost too well known in his own locality and that can occasionally create issues.
He said: “I had no real difficulty. I never really think too far ahead and I kind of focus on what I am at.
“It was a great opportunity and, apart from education, which is number one, a school should have sports teams, a good choir, a good library and some drama.”
“So I set about making all of this happen and I said if I could establish those pillars along with rest of the education, I am really going to enjoy it here. “And we did that. I coached the school teams, and the Geevagh GAA Club were a great help in this. I was still playing and they gave me great help and put their facilities at my disposal, so I was very lucky.
“I am still teaching here and I love it. I enjoy the job so much that sometimes I feel sorry for those people who are not teachers.”
“Every day you go in it is different and as a teaching principal I have the freedom to go off on a lot of tangents.” John is the principal of a six-teacher school with nearly 100 pupils.
“In our schools section, we have won Cumann na mBunscol titles three or four times.
“We dominated hurling and camogie for a number of years and won numerous titles and we were very good in indoor hurling.
“In the mid-1990s, in indoor hurling in the Teeling Centre in Collooney our club won U-8, U-10, U-12 and U-14 on the same night. The same year we won the schools indoor hurling and camogie.”
John coached the hurling and rugby and that took up most of his coaching. “The reason for that is the youngsters will always get football elsewhere in their clubs, but if they don’t get coached in hurling and rugby then they might not get it all.
“A past pupil, Ian Cullen, went on to play rugby in Australia and he came back and is now playing in Carrick-on-Shannon.
“My own son Ben played a bit of hurling in the school and still pucks around while working as a vet down in Athenry.”
But there is no hurling in Geevagh. “For a few years we had underage teams up to U-16 and we were quite successful. But we would really need someone from a hurling county to move into Geevagh.
“Gerry McManus gave me great help with the hurling. We got to a few county finals, did not win, but had some great battles with Coolera-Strandhill and a number of our lads have gone on to play at adult level with other Sligo clubs, which is great to see.”
A few went on to play underage for Sligo and John’s son Pat captained the minor hurlers and footballers in the same year.
John said: “We have a lad from the parish, Arthur Wall, who is on the current Sligo senior hurling panel.”
John also taught Sligo senior football stars Kenneth Sweeney and Shane McManus, as well as Donal Conlon, a current rising star and one to watch. John said: “At one stage Geevagh had half of the forward line in the Sligo senior football team, with Shane McManus, Pat Hughes and Kenneth Sweeney – a nice record in a league game.”
A feature OF Geevagh is that it seems to have more six footers per square foot than anywhere else.
John said: “I always say to the children that in any place where you have a mountain, they are going to be tough, and you want to be ready for those lads.
“Our current senior squad has no shortage of height either in those central areas.”
AND PAT ALSO taught some outstanding Ladies Footballers, who went on to such wonderful success with Coola Post Primary School in later years. He said: “I remember Stephanie O’Reilly well and I coached them. Some of them were good.
“I went to the second class and I brought Stephanie down to the pitch. I was kicking a few balls to Stephanie and she was fielding every one of them. So I knew I had someone who could catch the ball at least. She played for us and we won the competition that year.
“She was only in second class, but from then on she was playing either centre field or on the ‘40’. “Stephanie, Bernice Byrne and Sinead McTiernan all went on to play for Sligo and they were all in the same class and I had them for four or five years and we were unbeatable for those years and they were super players.”
He added: “They went on to win a lot of titles with Coola.
“We all trained together, the boys and the girls with rugby and tag rugby. I brought teams across to Bath in England at weekends to play rugby over there.
“Some of the rugby players from the school played underage with Sligo Rugby Club, including my three boys. “We also have school leagues. We have athletics, with field events like javelin, hammer and discus as something different.
“You are trying to pick up on children who might not be getting a lot of enjoyment out of football or hurling and something else might suit.
“And we have had children excelling at athletics and that is very rewarding.”
“Cross-country is big, and we won three Connacht cross-country titles, My eldest son Cormac was on the last winning team in the Noughties.
“We are always trying to have as many sports in the school as possible. You are always looking for something that suits everyone and of course you want to win. But looking back, what gives me the greatest pleasure is to see boys and girls that I have coached that are still playing. You are doing something right then.
“It can be down to a matter of luck as you could be living in one area with no county titles and a short bit down the road you could have a person with five county titles. So geography has a lot do with it.
“I get as much pleasure in seeing
“I say to the children that in any place with a mountain, they’ll be tough, and you want to be ready for those lads”
past pupils still playing abroad as I get from see boys and girls playing for the county.
“If you give them something for life it makes a great mark as that will be passed on to the next generation. “Your star footballer might only last 10 years, but sometimes you will have a child who would make a great club officer and you have that person for a lifetime.
“So it is very important seeing and more importantly encouraging what they are good at.”
John coached a lot of underage teams and the club was playing in the ‘B’ division and won a county title when his sons were playing in the 1990s. “We did all right,” he said. John is very proud of his son Pat, who apart from his ability as a footballer has tremendous leadership and is a very influential figure in Geevagh, and he is a great man to share what he knows and to encourage others who are playing with him. John said: “Kenneth Sweeney is very talented, and you could put him down for four or five points every time he goes out.
“He was a key figure and is living in Dublin and we are hoping that he will turn out this year as well.”
John is the current senior team boss and Geevagh have previously been Sligo Intermediate champions, and he was senior team manager for a period of four years. A few years ago, they were very unlucky not to beat Eastern Harps in the derby senior county semi-final in Markievicz Park. John said: “We were a point up at the break and we missed two half goal chances, and then Paul Taylor got two goals down at the other end from half chances and then they went on to win it. We beat a good
Curry team in the quarter-final. “We were going well then and I came back in 2019 and we won the Intermediate title by beating Bunninadden, who are a typical country team and where the Gormleys are still prominent.
Geevagh last won the Sligo Intermediate Championship title in 2019, to go along with titles won at this level in 1984, 1986, 1999, 2006 and 2009. John said: “We have won several Intermediate titles and not enough Senior and hopefully we won’t win too many more and we’ll stay up as a senior club.
“We are up Senior now with two county men and a county U-21, so that is a good start. We have Pat Hughes and Donal Conlon, as well as Kevin Henry, an ex-county minor. I think we are well able for the Senior grade.” Lockdown has been very challenging, and John feels especially concerned about the young people.
“The Seniors are on Zoom and the schools will be open in March and it will be St Patrick’s Day before the schools are all organised. There is no roadmap yet for the club Seniors, however.”
“Of course, it is not possible to bubble GAA players who travel up and down the country so I can see where the removal of elite status is coming from. It is not meant as a downgrading of the status of the GAA – it is because of the pandemic.”
When asked if the Sligo club games should start first this year, he said: “One of things that has come out of this pandemic is that a lot of sacred cows have fallen.
“It is a great chance to have a look at the whole structures, but one thing that suits the club player, apart from the welcome split season, is the shorter compressed season.
“For players and mentors, if you have a good year and reach a county final or a bad year in which you are trying not to be relegated, it is a long season. You are still playing up to October – that is a 10-month season from January.
“When I step down as manager, I know it will be hard to find a manager as guys in their 40s have young families and don’t have time to commit from January to October.
“And the ratio of training to games is absolutely ludicrous.
“Talking to Pat, these lads want games and there is so much uncertainty. I like the idea of the split season, otherwise I would be pushing the idea of clubs not having their county players in the league.” When asked would he like to see a Sligo Senior Football League this year, John said: “I would hope we would have a league but we will lucky if we can have a league this year.
“If it happens in July or August that would be great and when it is compressed it is much better.”
When asked what the GAA means to him, he said: “Well, it is a huge part of my life because of where I am from. “I think we are very lucky to have the GAA and we don’t realise how lucky we are to come from Ireland and to have these two great games and I often say this to the children. “These games exactly suit the Irish temperament with just enough physicality in it to give that edge. And they require skill, especially hurling, the great game of the Gael. It’s pure poetry and the game that bests tells the world who we really are.”
OUTSIDE of school John reads a lot and has about five books on the go at a time, “a book in every room”. And he is also very aware of the great history and folklore of his native hills.
Geevagh is Gaobhach, the ‘windy place’, and there is a great tradition of music and song here.
John said: “In my youth at any function, you could whistle, and two or three fiddle or flute players would turn up. There is a rich harvest of songs and stories.
“The late Josie McDermott was a legendary flute player and a neighbour of ours. He was very friendly with my mother and my uncle and went to school with them. What an artist he was.
“I never realised just how good he was until I was in Sligo in the Record Room two years ago and I bought a record of Josie, who played the flute, tin whistle and played jazz on the saxophone.
“He also had a band called Flynn’s Men. There is a monument to him in the locality there.
“There are some poets and old poems that I learned at school.
“We are very lucky here in Geevagh in that we have a monument to every era in Irish history – megalithic tombs and dolmens all through history. There is always something I can bring children to see.”
And when asked about this rich heritage, he replies with a wonderful story of one of the many proud sons of Geevagh who became famous abroad.
John said: “Around 2000 a party came to see me at the school. They were looking for the birthplace of a Patrick McCarthy.
“Now I had never heard of him as it was not a local name.
“But they gave me a biography that he wrote, and I read it and found that he was a young lad that left Geevagh in 1847 as a child.
“His mother never spoke English and the family went on one of the coffin ships. Both of his parents died in quarantine on an island in New York harbour and he and his siblings were then on the charity of the US. “Patrick was raised in an orphanage and taught himself to read and got interested in baseball and got a job with a horse and cart delivering milk. “When he arrived at a house he would pick up the paper and go to the back page to see how the baseball team was doing.
“One particular day a man coming home from a walk saw him and was amazed that this urchin could read at all. The man was a baseball fan too and he was also a lecturer in Harvard. He took Patrick under his wing and got him to Harvard, where he graduated. Pat got into politics then and became the mayor of Providence, Rhode Island.
“I went there two years ago, and my son went out and found his grave near Nantucket.
“His home ruins are still in Geevagh and it is a lovely story.
“In his book he is so positive, a real go-getter. He stepped down as mayor on a point of principle, so he was a man of character as well as a Geevagh man.
“It was all Irish in Geevagh up until the Famine and I often say to the children that the Famine might have killed a million people, but it killed a lot more. It killed the language until the likes of Douglas Hyde and the GAA came along.”
BUT AS LONG as we have fir fada and long-stepping mountainy men like John Hughes, our games, language and culture will never die in his heathery hills of home. Maith thú, Seán Mór.