On Gaelic Games:The power of tradition didn't just erupt in chosen counties at some stage over the past two centuries; it happened for a good reason. Last night in Killarney, award-winning Kerry broadcaster and former county footballer Weeshie Fogarty launched his book, Dr Eamonn O'Sullivan - A Man Before His Time, a labour of love on which he had worked for five years.

The author is well placed for the task. An indefatigable Kerry football enthusiast, he also worked with the subject professionally, as their careers overlapped for a few months before O'Sullivan retired as RMS (Resident Medical Superintendent) at St Finan's Mental Hospital in Killarney.

O'Sullivan had become interested in psychology during lectures at the Irish College in Rome, where he studied for the priesthood before deciding his vocation lay in medicine. There's no doubting his standing in his profession and the pioneering work he did in the field of occupational therapy, but in Kerry it is for football he is primarily celebrated.

One of the hardest ways to try to impress posterity is by managing Kerry football teams. There are counties where the man who trained teams to one All-Ireland title is enshrined in legend. In Kerry it's hard to think of anyone who did that without winning more.

This is the county where you can send out eight teams to win on All-Ireland final day and still be only joint-top of the roll of honour. Like Mick O'Dwyer, Eamonn O'Sullivan was in charge of eight All-Ireland winning teams.

O'Dwyer's exploits are remarkable in that they took place in such a short space of time, 12 years. But O'Sullivan's eight titles have the advantage of longevity - nearly 40 years - and were won over five decades: 1924, '26, '37, '46, '53, '55, '59 and '62.

Having been brought in as a 28-year old to prepare Kerry for the 1924 All-Ireland final (played the following April), he came and went over the succeeding decades, losing just one final - his last in 1964 - and winning the county's most famous All-Ireland in 1955, defeating a Dublin team built on revolutionary tactics and described contemporarily as a "scientific machine".

The book is a collection of impressions of O'Sullivan from a wide range of people, including himself in one chapter written in 1965 shortly before he died and titled " Self-Outline of Biographical Details", in which he dismisses with brisk modesty his role in the county's glittering history.

"These successes were not due to any personal 'magical touch' as has often been stated. Given a bunch of first-class footballers and pitting them under a few weeks' regimented and satisfactory schedule of training, any understanding coach could not fail with material such as Kerry has regularly produced provided that all important element of luck in the course of a game is not markfully (sic) against your team."

In pondering why Kerry have been the most dominant county in either GAA code, there is an indicator in the fact the two outstanding coaching manuals produced for football until the 1960s were both written by Kerry men.

Dick Fitzgerald, of the Dr Croke's club in Killarney, won five All-Ireland medals, captained Kerry in 1913 and '14 and was a brilliant tactician. He managed the team's transition from 17-a-side to 15-a-side and wrote the first GAA coaching manual, How to Play Gaelic Football, in 1914.

Over 40 years later Eamonn O'Sullivan followed with The Art and Science of Gaelic Football, published in 1958.

After Fitzgerald's sadly premature passing in 1930, Eamonn O'Sullivan was instrumental in the development of the famous Kerry venue, Fitzgerald Stadium in Killarney.

His input to the Fitzgerald Stadium project was unusual. O'Sullivan was asked, along with Croke's president Eugene O'Sullivan and former footballer John Clifford, to form the committee to commemorate Fitzgerald.

Despite local unease and outright criticism in some newspapers, he supplied patients to assist in the building of the new stadium. O'Sullivan's attitude was that patients were better off working out of doors than being locked up inside the hospital. He wrote a widely acknowledged medical textbook on occupational therapy, based on his experiences working on the stadium.

An excerpt from Textbook on Occupational Therapy is reproduced in the book and serves to emphasise the range of Eamonn O'Sullivan's achievements and the remarkable manner in which he was able to combine his two vocations of medicine and the GAA.

Weeshie Fogarty draws out the recollections of many who knew Dr Eamonn, as he was generally known, and paints a vivid picture of a central personality in the history and development of the GAA both in Kerry and nationally.

It is a timely publication in that for the first time since the days of O'Sullivan, the Kerry senior team is in the hands of a Dr Croke's man, Pat O'Shea, who also contributes to the book.

"He brought teams together for collective training before semi-finals and finals (a practice prohibited in the 1950s by the GAA as incipient professionalism). Now counties are going to Spain and Portugal to do collective training for a week. He instigated this idea of bringing players together for a particular length of time. Now it's called 'bonding' and we are told that it's more important than the twice nightly sessions. Dr Eamonn could see all of this way back in his time. He had amazing vision. His whole approach to his players, such as rest and recovery and understanding each player as an individual was way ahead of its time."

History is important to the GAA and Weeshie Fogarty has done a great service in bringing it to life.