I COULD never quite reconcile Seán Boylan with the Meath football team he managed for so long, writes FRANK MCNALLY.
One the one hand you had this mild-mannered herbalist, philosophical in outlook, always respectful of the opposition, gracious in victory or defeat. And on the other hand you had his team, for whose approach to football the euphemism "robust" might have been invented.
Maybe the two were more compatible behind closed doors. They must have been, I suppose. But as for their respective public images, it was like Mahatma Gandhi managing the Taliban.
Even so, Boylan is a good choice to front the current Vodafone ad for the football championship, reading from Rudyard Kipling's If- which is itself an interesting selection. The use of the old imperialist (Kipling, I mean, not Boylan) to promote Gaelic football will confirm the worst fears of those who voted against repealing Rule 42. First it was only foreign games in Croke Park. Now it's the poet of the empire. But, hackneyed as it has become, Ifremains hard to beat as a mission statement for sporting heroes, and the Dunboyne man delivers it well.
I only wish it had been part of the GAA's approved curriculum back in 1996 when my former school-pal Pat McEnaney refereed his first All-Ireland final and, within minutes, the mother of all schemozzles broke out. I'm racking my brain now to recall who was playing that day. Mayo and - oh yes, I remember now - Sean Boylan's Meath.
During the fraught moments that followed, Pat might have derived some comfort from the lines: "If you can keep your head when all about you/ Are losing theirs and blaming it on you. . ." But Kipling was still banned from headquarters at the time. So the ref had to make do with consulting his linesmen instead. It was, to quote another line from If, "an unforgiving minute". Happily, my old friend survived it. And if he didn't inherit the earth, exactly, at least they gave him another final four years later.
SPARE a thought for Kipling, though. His politics and writings have fallen badly out of fashion in the past century. But worse than that, for a man who hated nationalist Ireland, is the private hell in which he finds himself trapped of late. Only last year there was My Boy Jack, a film about the defining tragedy of his life, made here in the Republic with an all-Irish crew. Now, nine months on, he's promoting the GAA.
The author of The White Man's Burdencould hardly have foreseen such a turn of events, even if his entanglement with the southern Irish began during his own lifetime.
His son Jack was desperate to serve in the Great War, but was severely short-sighted, like his father. So Kipling had to pull strings to get him a commission. And thanks to a friendship with the great Anglo-Irish soldier Lord Roberts (whose horse - also a decorated war hero - is buried under a handsome tombstone in Kilmainham, 300 yards from where I write this), the commission was with the Irish Guards.
Jack Kipling died during his very first battle, in September 1915, the day after his 18th birthday. That he was officially declared missing in action only prolonged the family's agony. His father spent the rest of the war hoping he was still alive, and many years after that searching for the body, in vain. The remains were finally identified, much too late for Kipling, in 1992.
In Epitaphs of the War, the grieving poet expiated some of the guilt he felt: "If any question why we died/ Tell them because our fathers lied." His main act of contrition, however, was to be a two-volume history: The Irish Guards in the Great War.
This was not inconsistent with his politics - the many southern Catholics in the guards were serving the crown, after all. But in a 1918 poem called The Irish Guards, Kipling also paid tribute to their forefathers' service fighting for France against England, especially at the Battle of Fontenoy in 1745. That battle, incidentally, is still commemorated in the names of several GAA clubs, including one that another poet, Patrick Kavanagh, would have known well.
When Kavanagh played for Inniskeen Grattans, the grudge derby — always - was against the Donaghmoyne Fontenoys, who usually had the upper hand. In his football memoir, Gut Yer Man, Kavanagh quotes a local ballad commemorating yet another Donaghmoyne victory: "Then Inniskeen came on the field and they were stuffed with pride/ They fell before the Fontenoys like grass before a scythe." But back to Kipling and the poem about the Irish Guards - which, rejoicing as it does in the fighting spirit of the race, might have made a better promotion for the GAA (at least before the recent disciplinary crackdown) than If.
The poem is part of a vein that runs throughout Kipling's work. Whenever his plot required a courageous or romantic character, he tended to make him Irish, or part-Irish at least. Indeed his greatest creation, the eponymous Indian street-boy Kim, is Kimball O'Hara, the wise-beyond-his-years orphan of an Irish soldier.
So never mind If. For the real Kipling/GAA experience, look up the Meath-Mayo brawl on YouTube. Then turn the sound down and watch it while reading The Irish Guards, with its jaunty chorus: "Old days! The wild geese are flighting,/ Head to the storm as they faced it before/ For where there are Irish there's bound to be fighting/ And where there's no fighting, it's Ireland no more!"