Even if Seán Boylan had never swung a camán in the green-and-yellow of the senior and junior hurlers of Meath, nor yet managed the county’s senior footballers to four All Ireland titles, his life and times would make for a fascinating book, writes An Fear Rua …

The wily Dunboyne Alchemist – the man who specialised in taking the bronze of junior and intermediate footballers and metamorphosing it into All Ireland gold - is much more than a mere figure of sporting of importance.

Boylan comes from a family that traces their part in the struggle for Irish independence at least as far back as the Hill of Tara and the ill-fated Rising of 1798. His father, also Seán, played an important role in the political and military effort to establish the independent Irish state and was closer to Michael Collins than most of his contemporaries in that struggle. Seán himself has taken to new heights and synthesised his generations old family tradition of natural herbal medicine. He is a man of deep spiritual insight who, well into his thirties, pondered seriously on a vocation to the Catholic priesthood. Unusually, perhaps, among leading GAA people, the Jesuits educated him at Belvedere College, in Dublin. In many ways, they took the child and gave us this interesting man.

All these multifaceted dimensions of experience and character would have combined to make an interesting biography in its own right. Of course, because the book’s subject is Seán Boylan we get much more than that. We get memories, yarns and inside stories from the glorious years of Meath football – the years that illuminated the old game itself throughout the island. We get his views on the importance of good ‘man management’; he reveals some of the unusual coaching techniques he employed over the years; he gives his frank views on some of the developments and controversies of the modern game; he reveals his philosophy and psychology of the game and his training methods. Throughout this book there are many lucid and useful lessons for anyone – at any level of the game and in any club or county – who would seek to emulate him. There are fascinating pen pictures of many of the individual players who blossomed under Boylan’s tutelage.

The many and varied ingredients make for a veritable pot pourri of a book that will be of immense interest not only to Meath people, not only to football people, but to any one who is interested in understanding the human condition.

Boylan and his biographer, the distinguished former RTÉ radio producer, John Quinn, are well matched. Quinn himself is a proud Meath man from the village of Ballivor, where for many years his father was the local Garda sergeant. Unlike that other sergeant’s son, McGahern, Quinn seems to have had a happy childhood and a good relationship with both his parents. Prior to his retirement from the national broadcaster, his radio documentaries were pearls in the evening ether. Simply for titling one of these with the superb appellation Say good night Ballivor, for tonight I’ll sleep in Trim he deserves an accolade alone.

The book as presented suffers a bit from its provenance. It is clearly based on a series of taped interviews between Quinn and Boylan, then reduced to written format. For example, the same incident is mentioned or the same point is repeated several times throughout the book. At first, this just seems eccentric; after a while it becomes a little irritating. Some tighter editing and sub-editing could have eliminated this.

The narrative is inclined to hop back and forth between topics and this can be a bit disconcerting. The author and editor made the decision to sandwich football chapters in between life story chapters, in AFR’s view to the detriment of both. You can’t help feeling that the storytelling of the book and its focus might have been clearer if the football dimension had all been gathered into a succession of chapters. It’s almost as if the writer felt his readers would not work through the other aspects of Seán’s life unless there was the incentive of another ‘football’ chapter to follow. John Quinn is a very successful fiction writer in his own right but his discursive, wordy radio style occasionally breaks through too much in the presentation of this material.

The book really comes alive in Chapter Seven where we encounter Meath’s endeavours in inter-county football for the first time. Perhaps benefiting from recording the spoken word, there is a real, pacey sense of excitement whenever Seán recalls important games or worthy opponents. The various games and the preparation for them are all well described – just enough detail to set the scene and keep the reader’s interest but not so much that you get confused about who made what hand pass to whom in the final minute of extra time! Throughout the footballing chapters, Boylan’s analytical footballing brain shines through and adds immensely to the enjoyment.

Boylan makes the interesting point that Meath’s All Ireland victory of ’87 not only ended twenty years of dominance by five counties – Kerry, Dublin, Cork, Offaly and Down but it paved the way to several ‘first time’ winners of Sam Maguire from the early Nineties onwards. Some fans, however, mainly from the Kingdom, might argue that the great Royals team of the mid-Eighties onwards were fortunate to encounter a period of Cork dominance out of Munster rather than Kerry. There is a good description of the ’91 season and the thrilling four game encounter with Dublin.

Chapter Twenty Three is called ‘A walk on the wild side’. This is a truly remarkable piece of prose. In it, Seán takes us on a walk through the fields of his Dunboyne estate, lovingly and authoritatively describing each of the herbs and wild plants growing there and their various beneficial uses. The language is simple, lyrical and from the heart. It could take its place in any anthology of good writing and deserves a wide readership. It underlines that there is much more wisdom and lore to be mined from this man in book form or perhaps in radio or TV documentary format.

Seán Boylan’s ‘temporary little arrangement’ as coach of the Meath senior footballers lasted twenty one years. In that time, the county contested seven All Ireland finals, winning four of them. They achieved eight Leinster titles, three National League titles as well as the 1984 Centenary Cup. Seán is generous in acknowledging the role of players, selectors, backroom staff, sponsors, county officers and supporters in those remarkable achievements.

This united, team approach is the foundation of success in any county. The county board must have the self-confidence to give the manager the autonomy and authority he needs to get on with the job, untrammelled by GAA politics or other morale-sapping distractions. Jimmy Gray played that role with Kevin Heffernan in Dublin, Fintan Ginnity – to his eternal credit – did something similar with Boylan in Meath. There was a bit of a hiatus in 1985 when Laois hammered the Royals in Leinster and the county barely survived in Division One of the League. Fainter hearts would have rid themselves of Boylan and who knows how Meath football might have evolved. But the key players had seen enough of him and had tasted sufficient success to stand by him. The following year, their faith – or hope, or charity, or whatever– was rewarded by a breakthrough to a Leinster title victory against Dublin.

As usual with books from the O’Brien Press the cover design, layout and typology are excellent and there is good use made of photographs. An index would have been a useful addition and would have improved the book’s worth as a work of reference.

Seán Boylan’s name is so associated with Gaelic football that it may surprise some to know that his own inter-county playing career