Emmet Malonetalks to Bohemians captain Owen Heary who, despite the gloomy outlook, remains focused

WE'RE FINISHING up when Bohemians' Owen Heary looks at his watch to check if he can still make it down the road to pick up his kids from school. "It's the biggest benefit of full-time football," he says, "I get to spend time with them, to pick them up and then hang out with them around the house."

So, the best thing about being a full-time footballer is working part-time? "That's it," he says with a laugh before putting on some mock self-satisfaction: "Part-time work with full-time wages." Well, when you can get them, that is.

Heary knows all about the financial realities of life as a professional footballer in Ireland. He started out with Kilkenny City in his late teens getting a "few quid in expenses, maybe a fiver or tenner", then moved to Home Farm where he reckons he moved up to £30 a week. Eventually Dermot Keely persuaded him to pack in his job in a warehouse and go full-time with Shelbourne.

He has no regrets although becoming dependent on a football club for the money to pay the bills rather than a few bob extra in spending money hasn't gone without a hitch over the years.

But on the field things have gone well for the 32-year-old. During the best part of a decade at Tolka Park he developed into the league's best right back and so when the club hit the rocks financially there was no shortage of offers and the Dubliner got to join the club he supported as a child, Bohemians.

They'd been in touch three times before but the move never quite fell into place. Things got off to a bad start when the Bohemians official who called to arrange a meeting didn't recognise him in the pub, and on the second the club made contact a week or so after he signed for Home Farm who couldn't be persuaded to him go.

Having won five league titles and one FAI Cup before arriving at Dalymount Park, he's not complaining about the way things have turned out. If the Gypsies complete a double tomorrow by beating Derry City at the RDS then it might just count as something a little bit special.

This year's difficulties at clubs has taken a little of the good out of Bohemians' wonderful title -winning campaign with so much attention being diverted to one financial crisis after another. Having been in the thick of it as the players' union man at Shelbourne he knows the strain many of his colleagues have been under and finds it bewildering the players sometimes end up being portrayed as the bad guys.

"I don't think there's another job in the country where an employer is going to stop paying its workers and they're going to stick around," he says, "they'd be gone. Yet these boys are still going out and putting in a hard performance . . . To criticise them is a little bit unfair."

There have been no such problems at Bohemians this year although recent events in the High Court have raised some doubts about the ability of the club to maintain its current levels of spending. "I had enough of that at Shels. They're good lads running the club here and I don't get dragged into it the way I used to. Until they come to me and say they can't pay my wages or they want me to go, something like that, then all I want to do is concentrate on playing and winning things on the pitch."

He wants to finish his career at Dalymount Park, then go into management but he retains fond memories of Shelbourne where he spent the best part of a decade as well as the man who ran it, Ollie Byrne. "Ollie was great, to be fair, all the players loved him despite all the problems with money and it was gut-wrenching to see him go the way he did.

"We had our run-ins but there were never any hard feelings. I remember at the tribunal (where Byrne tried to prevent Heary being granted free-agent status over the club's failure to honour his contract) he said to me, 'I'll let you go for 10 grand,' and I said to him, 'Ollie, if you can get 10 grand for me I'll be delighted but no club is going to come in with money for me when they know I can go for free', so he went to the tribunal.

"He lost but we went for lunch afterwards and the first thing he said to me was, 'Do you want to go to QPR?" And I said, 'Ollie we're only after being in there sorting out whether I could get out of my contract. And he's going, 'Say nothing, I'll look after you, I'll bring you over there.' But the reality was I'd already agreed to go to Bohs."

His talent ensured he landed on his feet but he is aware as the season ends others won't be so lucky and that the league, as a whole, is set to suffer. "There's talk of all these players heading away but most of the players over here aren't good enough to go to England. Teams will be going back part-time but that's going to bring the league down a bit . . . the better players will be gone and a lot of the progress that's been made in recent years will be lost."

He has a year left on his contract and there has been talk about an extension but when tomorrow's game is over, the financial stuff will be more of a concern as friends and team-mates look to sort out their futures. Just now there is more immediate matters to worry about. Like beating Derry to win the cup and complete the double. That, and picking up the kids.