John Hayes is in the 'Presidential Suite' of the Westbury Hotel. The first look you get at him confirms that his back isn't supported by scaffolding, his shoulders aren't in the care of some fussing curator. He doesn't appear tired. There is no starch in his stride, no frost in his eyes.

People worry about him in the way people worry about an overworked old bridge. If 'Bull' goes down, everything tumbles with him. So there's this impulse to slap a protection order on his body. To rope him off. To send in the engineers and hope their arithmetic isn't gloomy.

We make him feel like a circus curiosity. You see, Hayes has been the main supporting beam of an Irish rugby scrum for eight years now. He will be 35 in November. He's just come off a season that would have imperiled the underpinnings of a locomotive.

Yet, the last two weeks have been spent making silage on the family farm in Cappamore. And, get this. He's already pining for pre-season. The man we mistake for an old pug in wind-down mode is back dancing on the balls of his feet.

He wears a white polo-shirt, stamped with the web address -- www.getyourbackup.ie. It's a natural connection. We think of back trouble and we think of Hayes. So the awareness campaign for Ankylosing Spondylitis snapped him up like an AA programme snapping up some survivor of momentous boozing.

Except, as Bull is quick to point out, he doesn't suffer from AS himself. Actually, his back is in pretty fine fettle all things considered.

He still has a year to run on his contract as a professional rugby player and, beyond that, he'd like to think that an extension might be feasible. "The body feels really good," he declares. "But why wouldn't it? I came to the game a late starter and I think that's standing to me now."

Could be it is too. Hayes was 22 when he turned pro and, though he has accumulated 84 caps, he has played international rugby for just eight years. And one of the people he has most admired in rugby is former England prop Jason Leonard.

The man nicknamed 'Fun Bus' accumulated 114 caps for England. He made a career of defying the ageist lobby.

One of Hayes's fondest memories is of the day in 2001 that Leonard loped into the Irish dressing room with a six-pack of beer. The Englishman had just equalled Sean Fitzpatrick's appearance record for a forward, yet handed his jersey -- his name and match date embroidered on it -- to a startled Hayes.

Bull doesn't drink. But, that day, he made an exception.

"There was Claw (Peter Clohessy), Woody (Keith Wood), me, Gaillimh (Mick Galwey) sitting in a line," he recalls. "And Leonard just came in with the cans and started handing them out. He sat down into the middle beside me. He knew Woody because they were playing together.

"So they cracked open the cans. And I wasn't going to say 'Ah no, I'm not drinking!' It would have seemed ignorant."

His respect for Leonard has since been unequivocal. "On the pitch he was no shrinking violet and he'd let you know that fairly quickly," recalls Hayes. "But he's a thorough gentleman off it. I first played against him when I was just starting out. People talk about players being durable. But he had a neck injury when he was 20 and still went on to win all those caps."

There is a sense of community about the soldiers of the front row. A kind of contradictory affection. Hayes admits that bullying is a fundamental thread of the front-row charter.

"It's all about that," he concedes. "Individually and collectively. It's all about taking the space. When the ref calls 'engage', it's who gets across the line first. If you win the engage, you'll invariably dominate the scrum. If you don't, you won't."

He lists his toughest modern adversaries as Oz du Randt, Andrew Sheridan and Sylvain Marconnet. A South African, an Englishman and a Frenchman. The first two forbidding buffalo, the third a technical wizard.

Yet, something within Hayes equivocates when it comes to considering the merits of opposition players. You see, he is as unpretentious as a bell-hop. He guffaws wildly at the suggestion that 84 caps perhaps establishes him as an Irish legend. It's just not a language that he entertains. Not a notion he embraces.

Maybe that's to do with the route he took. He didn't play rugby until he was 19. He didn't go to a rugby school. The first game he ever played was for Bruff RFC against Newcastle West. It ended scoreless.

He was a back-row and second-row to begin with. A 15 stone beanpole snapped up as a bit of a curiosity by Shannon. They gave him a few runs as a substitute in the AIL. He was working as a welder. Nothing in his story spoke of stardom.

But there was a Kiwi living in Bruff called Kynan McGregor and, when McGregor headed for home, John Hayes decided to accompany him. Then and only then, Bull was finally born.

For two years, he played with Marist in Invercargill. Welding for a wage, eating for a hobby, learning about human hardness. And it was Marist's wily old coach, 'Doc' Cournane, who first caught a glimpse of the future. Hayes remembers the day vividly.

"He asked me to play loose-head," recalls Hayes. "I was willing to try anything so I went in against this fella, Aaron Dempsey. Ended up good friends with him after. He was playing for Woodlands.

"Anyway, I got absolutely pulverised. Had my head turned up for the day, going around with everything crooked. Eventually, they switched me over to tight-head and I got on a bit better there.

"Funnily, when I went back with the Lions in 2005, Dempsey was playing for Southland in one of the weekend games. We were both playing tight-head, so we weren't directly opposing one another. But we swapped jerseys after.

"At one stage, he had been living across the road from me in Invercargill."

Mention of the Lions sets him thinking of the adversarial ways of international rugby. When he made that 2006 tour party, Hayes found himself wondering how players accustomed to demonising one another in opposing dressing-rooms might now gel. He needn't have worried. Indeed, one friendship took him by surprise.

"I got on well with Josh Lewsey," he remembers. "His parents are friendly with Fitzgeralds in Limerick. And they go to Kilkee on holiday. Now, Kilkee is Limerick-by-the-sea. I remember the first day we met up. We were chatting away and he just said to me 'Do you go to Kilkee on your holidays as well?'

"And I just started laughing. Here I had just met this fella from London and he knew about Kilkee! After that, I got on really well with him. Another fella I've gotten to know well is Adam Jones -- the hairy fella from Wales."

There isn't an ounce of affectation in Hayes as he considers where he is against where it is he's come from.

Three Triple Crowns with Ireland; two Heineken Cups with Munster; one Lions tour and the possibility of another next summer if his form holds. People wondered about his enthusiasm for the recent trip Down Under with Ireland, yet they did so only because they don't know him.

"The season was very long," he agrees. "But you get your weeks off and then there are no games for the first five or six weeks of pre-season. So you might go 10 weeks without playing a game. By the time it comes around again, you'd be sick of the gym. Mad for a game.

"Personally, I switch off in the off-season. Did the silage last week, so twas easy to switch off. I don't drink. I don't eat much rubbish. I've actually gone back lighter for the last couple of years than I've been finishing up. I've lost a few kilos.

"You eat so healthily during the season, you're just not inclined to change that. And the farming is physical. You're out every day. Like I don't go away for two weeks, lying in the sun. I prefer to be out, tipping around, doing something. I just don't gain weight. Just back, helping out dad. He has a stack of jobs piled up, ready to go (laughing).

"I love it. It just gets me away from things. It's a completely different world just being out in the fields, away from hotels and cities."

In the fields, he finds time for contemplation. It's been an odd, vaguely schizophrenic year in Irish rugby. On the one hand, the Heineken Cup and Magners League both went to Irish provinces. On the other, the national team never quite shed its World Cup torpor.

Hayes encountered the paradox at close quarters.

"I don't know," he sighs. "One went one way and the other went the other way. All the Munster fellas were trying equally hard for Ireland but, for whatever reason, it just didn't happen. We felt we were doing the same things we'd been doing for years, the things that had been winning us games. But we just didn't win them this year.

We had a huge build-up to the World Cup and it didn't happen. So we went back for the Six Nations and we were all determined to make up for that. We wanted to put it behind us, get on with things and just prove how good we are. But we didn't do it.

"We kind of did against Scotland and, against France in Paris, we came back. But just didn't finish it off."

Maybe above all others that French game captured the difference in microcosm. Camped on the French line in the dying seconds, Ireland just could not close the deal. The media view held that Munster would have done.

Hayes, though, is unconvinced.

"I don't agree," he says. "It's international rugby. It's harder to close out a game in Test rugby than it is in club or provincial rugby. We might have been putting a lot of pressure on France at that point, but this was still France playing in Paris. They were going to do everything to hold on. They weren't going to lie down and be beaten.

"And I think that's what happened. They just did enough to hold on."

But compared to Munster's implacable strangulation of Toulouse in Cardiff?

"Well maybe the Munster lads had learnt something from that experience in Paris," suggests Hayes. "Maybe we took something from that. That we knew how to do it. But they were different scenarios. Munster were leading, Ireland were behind. You just do what you have to do to win."

Undeniably, the World Cup left a virus in the bloodstream of the national team that, eventually, cost Eddie O'Sullivan his job. Hayes expresses sympathy for the former Irish coach. "Eddie put his heart and soul into it," he says. "He tried everything to get it right again, but it just didn't happen.

"And I suppose that's the nature of top-level sport. It's not easy."

A pertinent thought, no doubt, for O'Sullivan's replacement, Declan Kidney. And, indeed, Kidney's replacement at Munster, Tony McGahan. Nothing short of a Grand Slam victory or a World Cup semi-final place will now constitute meaningful success for Kidney. And McGahan, presumably, must retain the Heineken Cup.

Hayes agrees that the targets must, by necessity, be daunting.

Yet, regarding Ireland, he suggests a simple fundamental. "Everyone knows that it's a big job that Declan has taken on," he says. "But, first and foremost, we just want to get back to where we were. For a lot of this decade we were in the top two in the Six Nations. This year, we slipped out of that. So we just need to get back to winning games and see where that takes us."

And McGahan's Munster?

"Well, the big thing is he's bringing continuity," says Hayes. "He has three years done with us and he'll know that we have to move on now. I'd say he's the right man to help us do that. He's got great knowledge of the game. He breaks things down really well. He gets things across. He'll put something up on the projector and it just makes sense.

"You can see exactly what he's talking about. He makes it logical. He delivers it well."

The Heineken Cup promises another white-knuckle ride, but then Munster aren't in the habit of curtsying for big guns. Last season, they saw off holders Wasps, Clermont Auvergne and Llanelli in the so-called 'Group of Death', then won away to Gloucester and Saracens en route to the Cardiff final.

It made for the perfect triumph.

"Yeah, it was definitely more satisfying than two years ago," agrees Hayes. "It was different. The first time was all about this desperation to do it after so many years of trying. It was just like a case of 'Jesus, we have to do this!' Then we did it and it was great. There was nearly a sense of relief there.

"But it was so funny in the dressing-room afterwards. Everyone was saying the same thing. 'We have to do this again. We can't let this be it.' So I think there was more satisfaction this time, knowing that it wasn't just a one-off.

"But coming the route we had to come really added to that too. Because it was such a fine line just trying to get out of the group."

Still, ending the season with narrow Test defeats in New Zealand and Australia left a slightly jarring footnote for Bull Hayes. The defeat in Wellington, especially, given how close we have now come in three consecutive Tests on Kiwi soil.

Ireland has yet to record a Test victory against New Zealand.

"It's frustrating because it's possible," says Hayes. "That's the galling thing. We just can't seem to get across that line."

Take it that he's not yet finished trying.

- Vincent Hogan