Television soaps are, according to Wesley Burrowes, concerned with creating a form of reassurance. "These people become our friends. Nothing too terrible can happen to them so the audience can be reassured by their continuing presence. Whatever dreadful things befall us in our own lives, they shouldn't, they can't happen to soap characters. In real life, nobody `solves' their problems, their problems just become part of their history. In a soap, problems are solved."

It is another dark, wet, miserable winter's day. Burrowes - having recently completed Rat, a feature film set in Kimmage about a man who turns into a rat - seems content, pottering about his home in Bray, Co Wicklow in the company of his three, fine dogs, all awaiting the return of his wife. Life is less relaxed in his other world, that of Glenroe, where a team of alternating writers, relay-like, keeps the plots and the characters in a state of complex flux.

Burrowes has already planned his two, final episodes, which will be screened in May as the series comes off the air for the summer. This is his fourth and final farewell.

"I was always persuaded just to write a few more. At the beginning, I wrote 24 of the 28, and then for the first years I was writing 24 of the 32." During the past few years, he had reduced this gradually over the seasons. This year, he wrote four episodes. During Glenroe's first 15 years, he wrote 300 episodes, as well 300 episodes of The Riordans and all of Bracken (1980). Not only is he Ireland's most successful television writer, but he effectively pioneered the rural drama in this country. Above all, his work has reflected Irish social history and played its own part in the development of that history - never mind that of Irish television.

Sociological debates are hardly likely to impress Burrowes, who is a direct, candid character. Nor does he accept the role of social prophet. "I've written about things I've experienced - things that have been part of Irish life. You write what you know, but . . ." he pauses, laughs, and says - not for the first time - "I do think there's something presumptuous in each week presenting your view of how the nation lives." Why? "Specifically because of the illusion of reality. You want to reflect opinions rather than promote them.

"As a writer in such an influential genre, you're not entitled to hide behind the fictional characters of people who are respected as individuals of common sense in order to promote your own views."

While he has chronicled the story of Irish rural life as lived in the predominately Catholic South, he remains at 67 true to his Northern, urban Protestant origins. Born in Bangor, Co Down in 1930, the second son of a career civil servant attached to the education department at Stormont, he attended Royal Belfast Academical Institution and later went to Queen's University. There he edited the college literary journal, Q. One of his contributors was Philip Larkin, then the university's assistant librarian. Several of Larkin's early poems appeared in the magazine. Did Burrowes like him? "Not at all. Nobody did. He was an odd, miserable sort of fellow. Do you remember Sgt Bilko? He looked like him." Among Burrowes's friends at Queen's was the unionist historian A.T.Q. Stewart. "Of course, we knew him as Tony, but if you've got initials like his, you have to use them." Stewart was also at school with Burrowes - "He was the class swot while I was the fellow you'd find smoking in the air raid shelter."

Cricket, bridge - at which he later represented Ireland - snooker and the pursuit of girls he claims as central preoccupations of student life. Despite the many non-academic distractions of his student life, he graduated in 1952 with a degree in modern languages. He then began working in insurance in Belfast. Three years later, he was transferred to Dublin.

Burrowes's appearance is a surprise. His name, evoking an image of a solid individual of Planter stock, prepares one for a large, formidable, sullenly handsome man - someone resembling the British chancellor, Gordon Brown. In person, he is small, gentle, almost monkish, now hovering on the comfortable side of world weary. His voice is soft, even diffident. His replies are sharp, fair and to the point; his asides and digressions are fascinating and informed (and off the record) - as are his opinions. Cynical yet fair, he keeps a rein on the irony which appears to be central to his personality.

As a boy, he made many trips to Dublin and admits to having been smitten by the city. "I had this whole notion about literary Dublin. I thought it glamorous." The illusion lasted until he settled here. "I discovered that for all the talk of literary debate, a lot of amounted to vulgar abuse and certainly wasn't very intellectual. There seemed to be a lot of bitching, I was disappointed." As a child, however, "It seemed far more relaxed than the North. And I still believe there are two nations. I prefer to live in this one."

Further back, until he was about seven or eight, the family often went to Antrim town, where his father's people lived. "I remember being there in July and witnessing the awful bigotry of a Northern small town." He remembers being aware of the intimidating Lambeg drummers standing on the road outside some houses.

"They always used to stand on the same spot. It's a terrific noise, very loud. Even louder in a small place. "I used to wonder why they always stood there. I finally worked it. Those were the houses of the only two Catholic families I knew there." The differences between Catholics and Protestants were something he learned early. "We were Church of Ireland, we weren't Orangemen, but my people were unionist." Later, in 1959, when he married a Catholic - not in her own parish church - he sensed his own family's mute disappointment. Far more obvious were the various restrictions the Catholic Church imposed on a mixed marriage taking place in one of its churches. "We weren't allowed to have photographs taken; we couldn't have flowers; there were no friends present in the church. I think it (the Catholic church) wanted us to know it didn't approve."

A wartime childhood left him with some dramatic images. "On my 11th birthday, I was sitting under the stairs, my father had gone a long way to get chocolate for me. It was April, 1941, during the Blitz. Belfast was being bombed. When he came back, we looked at the sky over the city: it was bright red with the fires burning all over Belfast." More than 700 people were killed and 400 seriously wounded during German air raids on Northern Ireland during the nights of April 15th and 16th, 1941.

His father, Harry, seems to have been a colourful man, who joined the British army in 1914 and fought at the Battle of the Marne. "He was very young, in his late teens. They gave him a bugle - in time, he came to play every brass instrument: I think he played the trumpet in the Northern Ireland Light Orchestra. He was very musical, my sister Norma inherited his talent and she took a degree in music and she became a well-known opera singer." He walks across the room and takes a small picture off the wall by the fireplace. "Here she is: she was very pretty. She lives in Canada now."

Harry Burrowes was gassed in the first World war, "I think at Ypres. He was also wounded by shrapnel and received a disability pension." This did not prevent him from becoming an inter-provincial hockey player, playing on the wing. He later became an international umpire. Burrowes smiles at the memory of his father, a perennial youth. "In time, he became a big man for the drink." Of his mother, Carrie Irwin, who died at the age of 90 in 1988, he says, "she was great, very long-suffering. She also sang very well. But mostly she minded the four of us." Burrowes married his first wife, actress Liz Brennan, in 1959. Their daughter, Ciara, was born in 1962. The couple separated five years later. By then Burrowes had met a Swedish weaver, Helena Ruuth, who was working with Kilkenny Design. Their son Kim, now a stage manager on Glenroe, was born in 1970. That same year they moved to Avoca, in Co Wicklow. Creative writing as part of team is difficult and Burrowes admits he has found it increasingly so. In the early days of The Riordans (originally developed by James Douglas and set in Kilkenny), he worked alone. He recalls the actors on The Riordans coming up to him and asking him what was going to happen next. He often didn't know. Monday mornings could find him photocopying scripts to distribute to the actors before rehearsals began at 10 a.m. Such was the nature of the pioneering days of Irish television drama when everything was shot on video, using the Outside Broadcast Units more accustomed to covering sports events.

Burrowes joined The Riordans series from Tolka Row, RTE's first soap, taking over from Maura Lavery.

Research for The Riordans, which was filmed in Co Meath, led Burrowes initially in the local pub. "I would go in and talk to the farmers. I often saw them nodding at each other and saying `I told him that'."

Meanwhile, Burrowes was writing plays: in 1960 his first play, The Crooked House was staged in the Eblana Theatre. Carrie, a musical, followed in 1963 and was performed during the Dublin Theatre Festival. The cast included Ray McAnally and Milo O'Shea: it was bound for a London production when its London backer, the impresario Jack Hilton, died suddenly and the project collapsed. FROM the outset in The Riordans, Burrowes was intent on offering a realistic rather than a romantic view of rural life. The mythical Leestown world was filled with dairy farming and tillage. He was also lucky that, at a time when Irish television drama was dependent on stage actors learning television techniques, he could call on actors such as John Cowley and Tom Riordan. Of the latter he says: "He was the best actor I ever worked with." Cowley, meanwhile, had an ability to ad lib, a useful skill at a time when there was no electronic editing. "We could be shooting, and a passer-by could start up a conversation with John and we ended up filming it."

It was a gentler world than the tougher, more savage one evoked in the 1980 spin-off Bracken. This series, written in two, six-part sequences, was inspired by Burrowes's move to Wicklow, and also by the character of Pat Barry, who appeared near the end of The Riordans. Played by newcomer Gabriel Byrne, Pat Barry was the son of a Wicklow farmer who had drifted to Leestown, basically playing for time. The last episode of The Riordans saw Barry learning of his father's death and returning to Wicklow. Thus The Riordans begat Bracken, which remains to Burrowes the most satisfying of his creations. "There was a beginning, a middle and an end."

The handsome Barry had glamour, certainly. He was always a ruthless anti-hero, determined to hold on to his father's ailing sheep farm - without repeating the old man's mistakes. "Bracken was a Western," Burrowes says, and agrees that although the plot was partly sustained by the sexual tension between Barry and the spoilt daughter of the local wealthy farmer, menace, not romance, dominated it. Bracken also introduced a great double act in Dinny (Joe Lynch) and his gormless son Miley, played by Mick Lally. Dinny was deliberately softened near the end of the second series of Bracken, in order to make his character suitable to hang a spin-off on. And so Bracken begat Glenroe.

In the course of writing Glenroe, Burrowes became very interested in the characters of Mary (played by Geraldine Plunkett) and Biddy "which has been so brilliantly portrayed by Mary McEvoy". Biddy's mother, Mary, offers a complex study of a woman who never really grew up, yet who has a daughter who had to mature early. Eminently practical, Biddy has often had to do unpopular things which were unpopular in order to survive. "I've always preferred to write for women."

Burrowes has focused on the relationship between Dick (Emmet Bergin) and Mary, a realistic study of a mutual dependency, often undercut by Dick's appalling behaviour. "He's a spoilt boy who believes he is entitled to go off on raids. He is self-centred because he is handsome and successful.

"I had a bypass myself around five years ago, and of course I decided to share that with Dick."

Under Irish law, Dick and Mary's marriage is bigamous. "The public never reacted against this. I even had the character of Stephen (Robert Carrickford) paint the word `bigamist' in large, white letters on the front wall of the house. And still the public didn't react." It showed how things in Ireland had changed, he says, since the public outcry over Father Sheehy (Tony Doyle) advising Maggie (Biddy White-Lennon) in The Riordans to use artifical contraception because a second pregnancy would prove dangerous.

Is there a formula for writing successful soap? "Well, there is of course," he says mock-seriously, "but one thing is certain, you should never marry the characters off. Marry them off and you've had it. Young married couples are very boring, it's because they're so smug."