Anyway, he’d be all right on the building site.This is surprising, perhaps, given the garrulous and somewhat high-flown eloquence of Barry’s writing. His new novel, Annie Dunne, set in rural Wicklow in the summer of 1960, is narrated by Annie, an elderly woman of little education, who at one point in the story is amazed by the level of learning reached by a cousin who can use a word such as “beauteous” in everyday conversation. But Annie herself talks like a cousin of the learned builder: “The barn owl, that roosts not in the barns, but in the tallest pine at the margin of the woods, calls out one haunting, memory-afflicted note.”This is the kind of high-flown Irish prose that normally makes me itchy, but Barry stands up for its truthfulness: “If you listen carefully for how people are talking to you in Ireland, in certain districts, it is quite elaborate, there is a strangeness to it.” And in his novels – especially in what to me is his best book, The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty (1998) – the prose has a conviction that is hard to resist.Back to Annie Dunne: Annie is a crookbacked spinster, living out her old age at Kelsha, a farm owned by her cousin Sarah. While her nephew goes off to London to search for employment, he leaves his two children, a boy and a girl, in her care. The book describes her joy at this brief spell of motherhood, and in the beauty of the land around her, but also her terrors – in particular, her fear that Sarah will marry and that Annie, not for the first time, will be left homeless and destitute.This is fiction, but Annie Dunne was a real person. She was the writer’s father’s aunt and, in his boyhood, “my favourite person on God’s earth”. And he really did live with her at Kelsha through one summer.

By coincidence, he says, he can see Kelsha from the house where he now lives.Barry’s family is the thread that runs throughout the writer’s work. Thomas Dunne, the central character of The Steward of Christendom, was based on his great-grandfather, a chief superintendent of the Dublin Metropolitan Police, and Annie, Thomas’s daughter, was one of the minor characters. Perhaps more surprising is the realisation that Barry’s recent play, Hinterland, which finished its run at London’s National Theatre just last week, was also about his family.In the play, Johnny Silvester – an ageing, prodigiously corrupt Irish politician – muses over his past and faces accusations from his wife, his lover, the ghost of a former colleague, and his psychologically distressed son. English critics, who by and large adored The Steward of Christendom, gave Hinterland a cool reception. (Paul Taylor called it “a glorified promissory note; ‘fine writing’ in desperate need of a stronger dramatic mechanism”.)In Ireland, by contrast, the reception was somewhat hotter, thanks to Johnny’s close resemblance to the former Taoiseach, Charles Haughey.

Some made allowances – Fintan O’Toole, rueful in The Irish Times, found the play “deeply flawed but utterly compelling. It is hard to think of a piece that is at once so problematic and so unmissable” – but most were openly hostile. In The Irish Times again, under the heading “Poor drama and bad manners”, Eileen Battersby dismissed Hinterland as a “vulgar travesty” and a “sloppy farce”, complaining of “the moronic obviousness of its satire”.Barry himself says that he never intended to write a satire on Haughey. His purpose in creating a Haughey-like figure was, he says, “to hide my own family inside this kind of found world…”. The accusations of public corruption within the play were intended as “an objective correlative for an accusation of a father… It really is a play for me about what being a good father is.”Given the play’s quite explicit references to Haughey, this may sound disingenuous. Meeting Barry, though, with his deeply serious, gentle manner and his softly cadenced voice, it is hard to believe that he is insincere.