There are some interviews which pan out as expected, a few you dread and which don't work out, and then there are a smaller few which you just cannot categorise. An interview with Peter Clohessy is one of the latter category.

He's not exactly noted for singing like a canary and is wary of media types on a kind of shoot-the-messenger principle. A first request about a year ago had been politely rebuffed with the explanation that he wasn't doing interviews at the time. Fair enough.

Back this week in his former Brisbane pasture, where he played Super 12s for the Queensland Reds, Clohessy has been noticeably more relaxed and accessible to local journalists as well. He even poses for a photograph in the freezing outdoor pool, and runs swiftly inside to the elevator. "You're welcome" he says sarcastically. Later, he rings ahead, comes up to the room, helps to manoeuvre the couch, sits down and lights a cigarette.

It was here, three years ago, after two suspensions which threatened to end his career, that the Claw revived himself and undoubtedly initiated the best phase of his rugby playing life.

He rates his time in Queensland as one of the best seasons of his life. "Like you could train in the morning and go to the beach in the afternoon. It was like a rugby holiday as such." His wife, Anne, "didn't want to go home at all."

Although there are mixed views about his stint here amongst the media, his former Reds' coach John Connolly effusively maintains: "He did everything we asked of him in the five or six games that he played. The full-time professional training every day was a bit of a culture shock for him. He just hadn't been used to it and maybe that was partly why his back gave out on him. But he performed well and against Waikato he had an outstanding game. I still think it was that game which got him selected for the Lions."

Clohessy, laughing, accepts that the training was a shock to his system at the start. "The heat nearly killed me at the start. It was 33 degrees in the first week I started training, doing the pre-season training. That was all the hard stuff, all the running. After a week I said `what the ---- am I doing in this place?' But I got used to it after a while."

Clohessy claims he played three or four warm-up games, and six or seven Super 12 games, and was happy with his performance level. The pick of them, he agrees with Connolly, was at Waikato. "I played my best game that day. I think it was because the weather over here was killing me but over in New Zealand the weather was more like Ireland."

Australia has been good to him generally. Aside from being the only member of this Irish squad to have played on a winning team against Australia, he scored his first Irish try against Australia in Sydney five years ago when Ireland lost 32-18. "I think fitness caught us at the end of that match. We weren't full-time, they were."

As for the try. "A burst from the half-way line," he jokes, self-mockingly. "No I actually took a pop ball from a ruck, and it went in towards the centre of the field, and then it went wide and I got the pop from the next ruck as well. Mowed over Campese on the way. He actually knocked me but I got up again straight away and picked up the ball and dived over."

A great memory, though eclipsed by two others. "I think the highlight of my whole career would be winning the AIL with Munsters, or else beating England in Twickenham."

"It was just very emotional after winning it (the AIL). We put in an awful lot of work that year. I don't think we had the best team but we put so much effort into it that we wanted it at the finish.

"The Twickenham game was great as well. That was another game that I don't think we should have won really, but it was just that everybody dug deep, and put in 110 per cent."

Clohessy himself missed the craic when he was in Queensland and was looking forward to going home, all the more so as he'd been picked for the Lions tour to South Africa. "That was my last chance of going on a Lions tour. That was a great honour, especially after my suspension and everything. My first matches back were over here, so to get picked for the Lions I was delighted. It was kind of up yours to your dog and your budgie."

Alas, his back went. "I'd say if I'd had another two or three weeks I'd have been okay. But I did it bad. I crushed one of the main nerves which sends a message down to the leg. I lost all the power in my right leg. So I spent eight weeks in rehabilitation learning how to walk properly, trying to get the strength back up in it."

Clohessy thought he was okay when the Lions squad assembled for pre-tour training in London. But when asked to run backwards he suddenly kept falling. Paul Wallace was summoned, Clohessy went home.

He smiles about the post-script to it now. "It was gas. You know the conveyor belts in Heathrow separated by the glass partition? I was getting onto the flight to go to Dublin, and Wally was getting off the flight. We actually passed with the glass between the two of us. It was priceless.

"I just waved and wished him the best of luck but you couldn't hear through the glass partition. But, in fairness to Wally, he came back around again and gave me his commiserations."

Wallace's rise seemed to signal the end of Clohessy's international career, barring injury or loss of form to the new number three. But, accidentally, Clohessy became a converted loose-head on last summer's tour of South Africa. Reggie Corrigan was injured in the first game, and at half-time the substitute John Hayes revealed he couldn't play loose-head. So Clohessy said, to hell with it, he'd give it a go, and he's been a regular there since. The real test was against France. "I had no problems in that match, so I thought I had it conquered then."

That his appointed song for this tour should be My Way seems more than a little uncanny. "My wife actually picked that song. If you read that song there's a lot of truth in there, in things I've done."

Regrets, he's had a few and all that? Long pause. "Looking back, I would have a few yeah." Such as? "I didn't take it serious enough at the earlier stage maybe. I did a few things I shouldn't have done on the field but I paid dearly for them afterwards. I've put them all behind me now, and I think I'm a better player for it.

"The time that I got suspended for stamping on (Olivier) Roumat I was going to pack it in. I went through a rough month that time. I got flayed by the press. I deserved it maybe but I think they overdid it a bit. I was going to give it up that time and Anne said `no, give it one more time. Don't finish on a bad note.' So I came back then, and I think I came back more mature and more disciplined. I think it's stood to me."

So what then were the demons within which prompted some of the incidents which blighted his career, and the ensuing suspensions?

"It's just something that happens on the spur of the moment. I never went out on the field intending to do anybody or go out intending foul play or anything like that. It's just in the heat of the moment I think. It happens a lot of people.

"I spoke to Roumat afterwards," he says. "For a lot of players what happens on the field, happens on the field. Afterwards you have a pint with the lads and that's the end of it."

Does he hold any grudges of his own then? "I would never hold a grudge against anyone. Journalists, maybe. But they have their jobs as well."

Clohessy isn't enamoured with this part of the interview. The suspensions bring a stigma which can't be completely shaken off, though clearly he'd like to. "Like I say, what's in the past, is in the past."

So, how does he actually go about making himself more disciplined? "You just have to bite your tongue. If you think of doing something, just don't do it basically. You have to bring more discipline to yourself."

In all of this, it's hard not to observe that had the punishments and professionalism come sooner, then Clohessy would have been better for them. "Maybe, I suppose, if it hurts the pocket. That would have a lot to do with it, because it is my career at the moment. Like, if I stood on someone tomorrow and got 6-12 months suspension, you're talking about losing an awful lot of money."

Nonetheless, he doesn't regret the fact that professionalism didn't come sooner. "I enjoyed the game when it was amateur. There was a lot more fun in it then because you didn't take it that serious. I think you made a lot more friends when it was amateur as well."

He admits he's fitter now than he was in his mid-20s, and doesn't hide from his reputation as a bad trainer. "I was never one for training. The last fitness test we did, about six weeks ago, I got the best result I've ever done." His bleep mark is "confidential" though "well into double numbers". Eleven and a half is the word.

A bit of a wild boy once, by his own admission his wife Anne is a strong influence who has helped pull him together. "Without a doubt," he says unhesitatingly. "My mother was glad to see me going out the door to get married."

Whatever about being a changed man this is, according to him, a changed tour from the one of '94. That he describes as "the last great drinking tour". Philip Danaher recalls one training session in the heat, with the sweat pouring off him, when he caught sight of Peter Clohessy, incapacitated by a back strain, on the sidelines. He was wearing bermuda shorts, sunglasses, and smoking a cigarette.

Clohessy jokingly says that it's only the absence of Mick Galwey which made him appreciate what a bad influence his old mucker was on him. To think that Clohessy is now the squad's elder statesman is almost bizarre. And it's worth noting that the week-long ban on alcohol this time was his idea.

"This tour would be a lot more serious. Not that everyone wouldn't be enjoying themselves. We're all having good fun. But it's just more professional basically."

He concedes that there was "a lot more socialising" five years ago, and that maybe there was too much. "But at the time that's just the way it was."

Having missed the last World Cup through business commitments, he desperately wants the one this autumn. He hopes to have two more years of professionalism, and wind down with a year or two more at Munsters.

Life after rugby? "Abusing referees." Would he ever write an autobiography? "I'd consider it, I don't know." And what would he call it? "The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth."