One of the first items on the agenda for students at UCD after we suffered the trauma of moving out in October 1969 to the building site that was Belfield was where on earth we were going to get a pint.

In Earlsfort Terrace, we had been spoiled for choice, with Dwyer's, Kirwan's and Hartigan's all lurking around the corner in Leeson Street. But the Montrose Hotel, Belfield's nearest hostelry, so disapproved of anoraks that it would only serve students half-pints.

Building our own bar on the campus seemed to be the only solution, even if the initial reaction of J P MacHale, the college's secretary and bursar, who ran UCD out of his head, was hostile. However, we even managed to bring him around to accepting the need for a bar.

I was deputy president of the Students Representative Council at the time and, along with SRC president Ciaran Fahy and treasurer Pearse Reynolds, we set about raising the money to erect the glorified Terrapin building that would become Belfield's first bar.

Though all aged about 20 at the time and little used to the ways of the world, we put together a financial package of grants and loans to cover the construction and fit-out, advertised the post of bar manager and then - the cheek of us - presided at the interviews.

Seamus Boylan, who was working in Dwyer's on Lower Mount Street, was our unanimous choice for the job. He was both calm and affable as well as being extremely competent - and I suppose it's a back-handed compliment to us that he remained there for so long.

It was touch and go, at least at the start, because we didn't have the requisite club licence. Seamus, a married man with a young family and a mortgage to support, used to call out every so often to enquire how things were going and we did our best to reassure him.

But months passed before we finally put on our best suits to appear before the late Judge John Gleeson in the Dublin Circuit Court. With the licence now secured, the UCD students' club opened in August 1971. The price of a pint of Guinness, incidentally, was 17 pence.

One of Joe MacHale's conditions was that we couldn't serve spirits which, no doubt, he thought would have the same effect on us as "firewater" had on Native Americans. Within a few years, this restriction was dropped and students joined the gin-and-tonic set.

The biggest problem Seamus Boylan had to contend with was that the students' club was not, as we had hoped to make it, merely a division of the students union. This meant that it could be taken over from on year to the next by, say, the soccer club or any other college society.

But Seamus, ably assisted by his deputy, Eddie Cassidy (who we also hired), was able to cope with all comers. Calm and quiet-spoken, but also firm when he had to be, he was the rock of sense and stability that such a volatile gathering place needed, day-in and day-out.

He was present in 1979 on that notorious night when the club was raided by plain-clothes members of the Garda Drugs Squad. When they all stood up and flashed their badges, the amount of cannabis and other illicit drugs that hit the floor would have supplied a small army.

As the president of UCD, Dr Art Cosgrove, noted in a speech at his retirement party, Seamus Boylan also played a key role in establishing the staff common room - essentially a private bar with more comfortable seating for academics - on the first floor of the arts block.

He had earlier supervised the transition of the students' club from the original Terrapin building to a larger, more solid single-storey structure beside the restaurant. This, too, was a stop-gap measure pending the long-delayed construction of a proper students union building.

The old Terrapin, which seems to have been used for many years as a computer store, no longer exists. My first and only venture into property development was recently demolished and it was odd for me to walk across the tracery of its toilets on the way to catch a No 10 bus.

Looking back over the last 30 years, it is clear that Seamus Boylan was the right man for the job. Without his restraining influence and diplomatic skills, the students' club would have been an altogether more troublesome institution; indeed, it might not have survived at all.

He says he enjoyed every minute of it - well, almost every minute - and is genuinely sorry to be leaving; he has, after all, given Belfield the best years of his life. Now he plans to use the set of golf clubs he was presented with to enjoy himself in his retirement. He will be missed.