Showjumping Legends, Ireland 1868-1998, by Michael Slavin Wolfhound Press, £20
When Michael Slavin was first approached more than two years ago about the possibility of writing a history of show jumping in Ireland, coercion rather than persuasion was the first word that sprang to mind.
Dr Alec Lyons, then national chairman of the Show Jumping Association of Ireland, had been at the launch of Slavin's first tome, The Book of Tara, and had promptly asked the author if he would do a similar work on Irish show jumping. "Never," was Slavin's instant reply. But a fortnight later Dr Lyons was back again, a meeting was set up with Wolfhound Press, and there was no turning back.
"But it was actually fun writing it," Slavin says of his latest book. "In a sense it almost wrote itself. The enthusiasm and willingness of people to tell their stories indicated to me that the story was worth writing."
Slavin has never claimed to be an authority on matters equine, although his knowledge is now little short of encyclopaedic. "I just have an extraordinary enthusiasm for the horse and what people can achieve with the horse", he says, adding that he wrote Show jumping Legends from the point of view of a person in the crowd, following his heroes through their triumphs and disasters.
Michael was born on a smallholding near Bailieboro in Co Cavan, and neither he nor his brother or two sisters ever actually rode a horse, although the young Michael would watch spellbound as the local version of a modernday horse whisperer worked with neighbours' horses in the Slavins' field.
Aged just seven, Michael did drive a donkey and cart around the farm and, sixty years later, appeared on the hallowed turf of the RDS driving a donkey and trap at the Dublin Horse Show.
The Slavin family moved to Dublin immediately after the war and Michael clearly remembers Michael Tubridy winning the Grand Prix at the Horse Show. "The only problem was that we could never get in for free," he says. "We always managed it at the local shows, but we never found a way of sneaking into the RDS!"
Three years later the family moved to America, where 17-yearold Michael finished high school and then did his Bachelor of Arts and Masters in education and psychology, and it wasn't until 1970 that he returned to the land of his birth.
After starting up a donkey stud in Tara, Co Meath - where he still lives, and plans to be buried - Michael Slavin embarked on a career in writing, with his first words published in The Irish Field as a letter to the editor.
Now, after a baptism of fire as a radio commentator at Hickstead in 1992 - "when I made a total b***s of it and RTE wondered if they had picked the wrong person" - and a lifetime of journalistic endeavours on the equestrian front, Michael Slavin's writing has truly come of age.
But those years of being a face in the crowd paid off when it came to writing this latest book. He has managed to catalogue the exploits of equine legends and their equally legendary riders with the honest admiration of the ordinary onlooker, so that Show jumping Legends is more than just a book for the already knowledgeable reader.
It is a celebration of all that is good in the sport, with the names of Seamus Hayes and Goodbye, Tommy Wade and Dundrum, Iris Kellett and Rusty and the still revered Eddie Macken and Boomerang featuring prominently. But it is not all simple glorification. The skeletons in the cupboards are paraded, too, making for a fascinating read rather than a trite eulogy.
If you are even only vaguely horse-oriented, miss it at your peril.
