A DOZEN or so years ago, in a special issue of The Literary Review entitled Ireland and the Arts, Nuala O'Faolain bemoaned the lack of women's popular fiction in Ireland. "The topic of women and writing is interesting not for what there is around but for what there isn't," she said. "There's journalism, there's female demagoguery, but there isn't yet that most potent of resources, a book with people in it and a plot, that feels like a true document of change. If one comes, more will come. Meanwhile, it's all quiet on this most western front.

What a difference a decade makes. As O'Faolain was penning her lament, Maeve Binchy had already begun the first of her stories describing the lives of Irish women, stories which were to go on to attract a massive international audience.

And true to O'Faolain's prediction, where Binchy led others have followed, so that today we have - to name a few of the most successful - Patricia Scanlan, Mary Ryan, Deirdre Purcell, Rose Doyle and Liz Ryan, all being bought in their thousands here at home, and selling in varying amounts abroad.

For every one who is making it, there are hundreds more trying to break in. Treasa Coady of Townhouse, the publishers who launched Deirdre Purcell and Rose Doyle among others, says she receives countless manuscripts from women writers hoping to crack the mass market. "What's interesting is that so many of them will say they categorise their submission as a bestseller," says Coady. "This is the market that seems to appeal most to women writing in Ireland today."

So what has happened during the last decade? How did we go from a situation of "all quiet" to ode where it sometimes seems as it every woman in Ireland is writing fiction? Maeve Binchy believes it's down to confidence, a combination of Ireland gaining confidence about its place in the world and women gaining confidence in theirs.

"There was a feeling in Ireland in the 1950s and 1960s that we were not terribly interesting," she recalls. "We thought anything that happened anywhere else was more important and more exciting than our humdrum lives. Women also thought it wasn't quite ladylike to be pushing yourself forward, shouting about what life was like for you. But women here don't think like that any more, thank God.

"The Irish were always great storytellers. Once Irishwomen started gaining confidence it was inevitable that they would start telling their own stories."

These stories, whether contemporary or historical, tend to focus on social and personal issues. Like all fiction which sells in great numbers, mass market fiction for women is realistic, uses simple and descriptive language and is plot driven, not experimental. But contrary to the belief of some commentators (those who never read "books like that"), it is often far from glossy, and deals with themes other than romance.

"Many of the darker subjects like violence, incest and child abuse are now covered in mass market fiction," says Kate Cruise O'Brien, literary editor at Poolbeg publishers. Most such writers reject the romance label. Their books deal with love and marriage, yes, but also with issues such as work, abortion, marriage breakdown, alcoholism, family life, business - anything that falls under the category headed "life".

The "books like that" attitude of critics and commentators is an occupational hazard for the writer of mass market women's fiction. This genre is subject to a sneering snobbery less often extended to other popular genres such as crime, espionage or science fiction. In any genre, there are well written books and there is drivel. But popular women's fiction tends to be dismissed by definition.

"I think it's a subcutaneous form of anti feminism," says Deirdre Purcell. "Genres like spy fiction or science fiction are mostly read by men, and written by men and this form of escapism is seen as more serious because of a subconscious assumption that whatever men read must be more serious than what women read. But this is totally skewed. It is women's fiction which deals with the fundamentals - love, sex, birth, death, family - and men's popular fiction which deals with the peripherals like espionage or politics, which is really only about how one form of human society conducts itself."

Another part of the problem Purcell believes, is a tendency among journalists to lazily lump all women writers together. The work of, say, Jilly Cooper and Maeve Binchy could not be more different, but they are both discussed under the "women's fiction" umbrella, an erroneous categorisation by sex which would never be applied to, say, Jeffrey Archer and John Grisham.

This is a regular moan among the writers of popular fiction when they get together but they shrug it off by focusing on their readers. For most, it was the potential volume of readers which attracted them to the genre in the first place. As yet, only Maeve Binchy has reached the superseller league. The ability of a writer to market her book gives an edge in this competitive field, and Binchy complements her skilful writing with a warmth of character that personifies the qualities readers love in her books.

Her success has been an inspiration for many of the writers who followed her, who have found, however, that involvement in this business does not mean overnight wealth. Rose Doyle, for example, supplements her income with freelance journalism. Patricia Scanlan, whose books have sold more than 400,000 copies in Ireland, says the widely held assumption that writers like her are living on champagne and caviar is a myth.

"It's a slow build up," she says, "I am making more money as each year passes and I have been lucky enough to be able to leave the day job. But last year I had to have an operation on my back and I wasn't able to work for a while which brought home to me the lack of security. If you don't produce a manuscript, you don't get paid." To make it big, it is essential to crack the international market, where competition is fierce and the field already overcrowded.

"When I first heard that you have to be on your fifth or sixth book before you start making money, I hardly believed it. I thought I'd bang out a blockbuster and away I'd go. That's not how it happens. I have taken leave of absence to write my books, so between tax breaks and a supportive editor, I do fine. But I wouldn't like to be trying to live on the income from fiction writing alone," says Liz Ryan.

If it was simply about making money, I don't think I would have turned to writing fiction," says Rose Doyle. "There are other ways I could have made a better living - fiction writing is very risky. It has to be something you really want to do."

A real love not just of fiction but of popular fiction is essential for the aspiring bestseller writer, says Kate Cruise O'Brien. "Somebody whose preference is literary fiction `going slumming' just to make money won't work," she insists.

ALTHOUGH in theory anybody can carve out a career in popular fiction, it is striking how many of the successful Irish writers are, or were, journalists - Maeve Binchy, Deirdre Purcell, Rose Doyle and Liz Ryan, for instance.

Deirdre Purcell says she found the transition from journalism to fiction to be "exceptionally tough. Your training as a journalist is to be succinct. As a fiction writer what you are trying to do is cosset the readers, draw them into the story by painting word pictures. I found the necessary expansion of the writing terribly difficult and compensated by overwriting like mad. Now, with experience, I'm pulling back."

Treasa Coady, on the other hand, believes journalism is a good training ground. "If you're writing mass market fiction you are in the entertainment business," says Coady. "Journalists know how to think about the reader, they know about deadlines, they already have a training in writing clearly with the reader in mind."

There is great solidarity among these writers, who see each other as colleagues, not rivals. "Writing is a lonely business and hard work," says Rose Doyle, "so it's great to get together with others who are involved to have a chat." "When I finish a book, the first person I ring is Deirdre [Purcell]," says Patricia Scanlan.

MaeveBinchy says she couldn't be more delighted to see so many Irish women writing now. She believes "writing is not like a cake where if you take a bit, there's less for everybody else but more like a pile of stones to which everybody who comes along is adding another bit."

The more writers there are telling their stories, the richer and more influential the genre will become. And the more incredible it will seem that there could ever have been a time when a commentator lamented the absence of Irish women's popular fiction.