AIRTRICITY LEAGUE:AS EVERYONE at Galway United was busying themselves preparing for a licensing appeal that the club expects to be heard on Monday, there was some relief at Dalymount Park yesterday that Bohemians' problems have at least moved beyond the stage of having to scrap for their very survival.

Manager Pat Fenlon, in fact, was meeting the media in order to announce the signings that will form the backbone of his squad.

It says something about the state of every other club’s finances that Bohemians’ budget has gone from €1.7 million in 2008 to a little over €250,000 for this year and still the list of names the manager read out included Liam Burns, Ger O’Brien and Aidan Price.

The idea is that the new arrivals along with one or two former Sporting Fingal players he still hopes to add and the handful of survivors from last year will provide a platform on which Fenlon can bring through the most promising of the club’s young players.

Given the experience of Owen Heary, Mark Rossiter and, when fit again, Glen Cronin, the undoubted if slightly volatile talents of newly-signed Anto Flood, Robert Bayly and under-21s Roberto Lopez, Ryan McEvoy and Marc Hughes, Fenlon believes Bohemians can be “competitive” and then build from there.

Money, though, talks loudly in football and he cautions that the club’s fans will need to be patient. “There are three or four clubs out there who seem to be spending more than us and on the basis of that, they’re likely to be up above us at the top of the table.”

Fenlon spent a fair bit of money himself when the club had it but maintains his employers got a decent return on the investment which, he notes, was never the biggest outlay in the league. “There is certainly a perception out there we spent a lot of money but it was reduced drastically from when I came in to last season plus we brought in over €1 million in prize money and European money, €150,000 in transfers as well as five trophies . . . I think the staff deserve some credit for it.”

Now, he admits, the challenge has changed. The structure of the club has to be overhauled against the background of continuing uncertainty regarding Dalymount while there will be some evolution on the coaching side with Heary, for instance, likely to be confirmed as manager of the reserve team in the coming days.

There is still the Setanta Cup and Europe to think of but are viewed now as providing experience for the future as everything must be done with far slimmer resources, something Fenlon maintains was actually a factor in him sticking around.

“I didn’t want to walk away from something and for people to say, ‘well, the money ran out so he walked away’. It’s important to build the place back up and that’s what we will do. I want to be part of that and I hope to sit down shortly with the board and discuss my own situation. It’s a big club, a massive club with a great history and it deserves to be up around the top end of the league.

“Hopefully we can put a challenge in this season,” he says, “but I think it’s important that we restructure the club properly on and off the pitch. Massive work has already gone in on the schoolboy end and I think we will see that come to fruition over the coming years so it’s not all doom and gloom.

“From a structural point of view we want to put the club in a place that we can return to where we were in two or three years’ time.”

It’s would be quite an achievement in the current environment. Prize money for the league has just been halved, sponsorships are hard to come by and full-time footballers are more or less extinct in Ireland now with nobody due to be paid €1,000 a week by any club this season (at Bohemians there is a ceiling of half that amount) or to get wages beyond the last match of the campaign.

For all his determination to make things work at Bohemians again, though, Fenlon’s disillusionment with the wider state of the game here is scarcely concealed when the subject comes up.

“I have an opinion of the league and I think everybody knows it,” he says with a wry smile. “I don’t have to answer a question about the league; it’s there for everybody to see.”