The Late James O'Donoghue IT TAKES a rare and special kind of person to be not only and simultaneously a delegate to the Tipperary GAA County Board, a teacher at Thurles CBS secondary school and an under-age coach with the O'Loughlin Gaels club in Kilkenny, but to carry out the associated duties with equal measures of flair, passion and happiness. James O'Donoghue, who died recently after a short illness, was that kind of person. And much, much more besides. He came to Kilkenny a stranger. He left an honourary citizen of one of its parishes, which shows that there's something to be said for moving towns and embarking on a new phase of life in your 30s. One starts again from scratch, which is what James did on arriving in St John's parish a few years ago. No back story, no baggage, no preconceptions. Just new friends and acquaintances, if one can be bothered to try and make them. As James was. There was vast chunks of his life that his Kilkenny friends knew nothing about and probably never will. But that didn't matter, not for him and not for us. what we saw was what we got. We took James on his merits, and his merits were considerable. Among the most impressive was his willingness to become socially engaged. Landed in a new city, James could have stayed at home, surfed the Internet, re-read his Brian Moore books or gone to the pub - as indeed he did, all of those things in their place. But he also got out, got involved and stuck into activities in St John's Park. "Ask what you can do for your club" - except O'Loughlins wasn't James's club by birthright. He linked up with them not because he had to, but because he wanted to, through his sheer love of hurling and his appreciation of the importance of sport, especially for young people. Very quickly he helped bring the under -14s to a first-ever Feile na nGael final in Belfast two years ago. It was an achievement as ground breaking in its own way as anything the O'Loughlins senior team have achieved in the past few seasons, and no less important. That James and the present writer became friendly - if, alas, only for the last 18 months of his life - was not a surprise, given the reference points we shared. Similar age, similar interests, similar musical coordinates, a similar Sunday night port of call in Mick Dempsey's in John Street, an agreement that Dawn Run's Gold Cup was the most profound and electrifying Irish sporting moment of our time. (He'd watched it amid the pandemonium of a students' common room in UCC, me in the slightly more sedate surroundings of Shem Lawlor's - Dempsey's in its previous incarnation.) But in Kilkenny, James found common cause with more than just the likely candidates. Many obituaries, such is the nature of the game, are prey to euphemisms; de mortui nil nisi bonum and all that. Not this one. To say that James possessed people skills in abundance, plus intelligence, wit, a light touch of sarcasm, common sense, enthusiasm and thoughtfulness to boot, is the plain and unvarnished truth. You know you're doing something right when Busty Sullivan thinks the world of you, like he did of James. It is doubtful if a higher form of praise exists. How deeply James touched the members of his adopted club was apparent at his funeral in Tipperary in mid-March. At both the removal on the Friday night and the burial next day, they were there in immense and almost ludicrous force, green jacket after green jacket. Had fortunes assumed a slightly different twist at Semple Stadium a month earlier, O'Loughlins would have taken their place among the nations of the earth in the All-Ireland club final at Croke Park on St Patrick's Day. It would have been the biggest day in the club's history. But it still wouldn't have been a finer moment for them than was their show of solidarity and caring at James's funeral. His own finest moment? For me, that's easy: the night of last year's All Ireland semi-final. His beloved Tipperary, with whom his uncle John won All-Ireland medals in 1964 and 1965 and was successful selector in 1991, had not so much been beaten as been reduced to their constituent parts, yet James still turned up in Dempsey's to take his beating. He was disconsolate, puzzled, rueful, gracious and generous all at the same time. Now invert the situation and try to imagine the attitude of a Kilkenny person in a pub in Clonmel or Thurles after a 12-point championship hammering by Tipp. Hell, try to imagine a Kilkenny person in a pub in Kilkenny being anything other than sullen and bitter in the circumstances. Bet you can't. I know I can't. The dying of his own light took place quickly and in silence, with - again the measure of the man - no self-indulgence or song and dance routine attached. Most of James's Kilkenny friends had no idea he wasn't well; this one had no idea just how serious his illness was and how remorselessly it had taken hold. Hemingway - he whose famous line about grace under pressure is usually dragged up in the most facile of contexts, to describe a goalkeeper or defender who plays well on a hopelessly outgunned team or whatever - should have been alive to witness James's equanimity in the face of a clock that had started ticking again and wasn't going to stop. This surely, was what Hemingway meant. One doesn't expect to have to delete a 36-year-old from the speed dial on one's mobile phone. But James did sent me a picture text in mid-February; an O'Loughlins GAA club logo. That'll stay. "I don't think he had any appreciation of how much he was appreciated," was how Mick Dempsey put it on that dismal Sunday night after the funeral, when reality finally kicked in. No, James almost certainly didn't. He would probably have been embarrassed if he had. But the turnout for the obsequies showed the rest of us exactly how much. It was a sliver of consolation to take home and store against the years to come. He didn't make it to Cheltenham week, although I'm pretty sure that he would have made it to St Patrick's Day had O'Loughlins overcome Newtownshandrum. He won't plan another Harty Cup campaign with Thurles CBS, or witness the boys from St John's parish he took to Feile grow to manhood, or see Tipperary winning the All-Ireland again. For my own part, I'll never meet him again for a drink, hear about the more promising youngsters on his school teams or discover what new reading he picked up in Khan's Bargain Books in James's Street. And yes, I know - placed alongside the loss to his family, his oldest pals, his school and O'Loughlins, that's a pretty insignificant and irrelevant coda. But God, how it stings. For the members of James's adopted club and his latterday friends in Kilkenny, it was both a pleasure and a privilege to have known him. More flowery epitaphs than this have been written in the past an will be in the future. Not more heartfelt one, though. Courtesy of the Kilkenny People, April, 2004 Tweet

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