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close to the next moment jar : How do you see your generation of fiction writers? I mean those who started writing in the 1980s and came to prominence then. Do you see them as having markedly different concerns, obsessions or even formal strategies from previous generations of Irish writers? And how would you place yourself in that context?

ae : It’s interesting. There was a generation of writers who started writing and being published in the 1980s. But some of these writers are ten years younger than the writers that preceded them, and I’m ten years younger again. So I don’t know how to mark out the generations. In critical terms there may be an idea here of the shift from rural to urban concerns. I think of that as a modernising shift, or a shifting to the modern. That doesn’t mean much to me personally. I don’t define myself against a rural tradition, although I remember being impatient with one. And certainly I continue to be impatient with ideas about authenticity that hearken back to a rural, patriarchal tradition, which to me is a false tradition anyway. Ireland is a very matriarchal country. So how has it suddenly become all about blokes in wellington boots? I don’t think the countryside existed in the way it was often described.

jar : The 1980s and 90s in Ireland were a time of rapid cultural and economic change. It’s clear that the values and orthodoxies of one generation were being dismantled by a subsequent generation. When attitudes change in a society, does it follow that the writers in that society are changed too?

ae : Society changes, yes. But I don’t know when a literature changes. I don’t think writers write from or reflect the mores or the restrictions of a society. A lot of the creative impulse is about overcoming restriction. If you look at how a society changes, there was a stage in Ireland where you could say that change had effectively happened but that people didn’t yet realise it. The civil wars of the 1980s about abortion and divorce and contraception were mostly about people refusing to recognise what had already happened around them. You construct a political framework for change and you realise that these frameworks happen after the fact. And much later than the actual change.

For my generation growing up there was a lot of arguing with parents and authority figures. In practical terms, the argument was