Travellers in Ireland in the 18th and 19th centuries often noted that everyone claimed descent from a long line of kings or chieftains, and even the humblest cabin dwellers could recite lengthy genealogies tracing their ancestry back many generations - even to Adam in some cases. 

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The genealogy industry earns its profits from our desire to connect with a distant past, and to invest our existence with some greater meaning and significance than the modern world  can provide. It will readily (and not entirely untruthfully) declare to its customers via a DNA test that they are 60% the descendants of Irish kings, 15% Viking raiders and 2% Saracen warriors. It will sell them family crests and clan tartans of dubious authenticity, and even provide them with the unique pattern to ‘knit your own Boyle family Aran sweater’. Here it is, should you want to have one.

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Whether all those who now bear the surname Boyle are actually descended from the Ó Baoighill sept is debatable.  Although Ireland was among the first European countries to regularise the use of surnames, this may only have applied to the aristocratic elite and their collateral lineages.  Traditional Gaelic society was exclusive and hierarchical. The majority of the population in a Gaelic lordship were landless workers who sold their labour to the landholding classes in return for a proportion of the agricultural goods they produced. They counted for little as far as the elite were concerned, and up to the end of the Gaelic period (about 1700) they may not have needed, or used, hereditary surnames. 

Some of these may have been simply the poorer members of the sept who, over the generations, had lost the right to hold land. Others may have migrated from a different lordship, either voluntarily (since there is some evidence for a degree of labour mobility) or otherwise, seized in raids as slaves or hostages[Farrell, G. (2017) pp 165-166].  As the use of surnames became more common, they may simply have taken, or been given, the name of their overlord, much as African-American slaves in the Deep South adopted the names of the plantation owners.

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Nevertheless, it is probably fair to say that, either through blood or service, since we now bear the name, we are connected through the paternal line to these people who lived up to a millennium ago.