Behind the urbane facade there is also a trenchant administrator, who will soon leave his post as medical director of St Patrick's after 12 fruitful years, although he will retain his consultant post. He and his wife Jane will be vacating the house on the grounds of St Patrick's which goes with the job, and Clare is concerned about whether they will be able to afford a house in Dublin. Of all his achievements at St Patrick's, he is proudest of the improvements in the physical buildings since much of the stigma of being a psychiatric patient is in the often poor visual environment of hospitals. He has also overseen the development of clinics devoted to eating disorders and chronic fatigue. "We have had patients admitted in wheelchairs and eventually they get out of bed and walk out of here," he boasts.
Yet despite his success, he has contemplated throwing it all away. "I don't know how my colleagues who practise clinical psychiatry morning, noon and night do it. Half my job is administrative, management, and I like that. And I have my broadcasting and writing interests. Full-time psychiatry would kill me. It's very draining and giving. People who are psychiatrically unwell are very demanding, and that drains you and makes you difficult to live with sometimes. I do remember going home sometimes feeling fairly irritable," he says.
In the battle between the sexes, Clare has always been on the front line in his personal life, enjoying a combative relationship with Jane, even to the point of arguing publicly - albeit in the refined media of print - over divorce. The couple have seven children: Rachel (33) who works for the Henley Centre, social forecasters; Simon (30) media director with Coral, the gambling and leisure group; Eleanor (29) nurse in Crumlin, and getting married next year; Peter (24), studying acting at TCD; Sophie (20) doing English at TCD; Justine (17) who has just completed the Leaving Cert and intends to do equine studies and Sebastian (15) who has just done the Junior Cert.
Guiding all their lives has been Jane, whom Clare calls "the rock". Jane is a "truculent, feminist in domestic clothing", he says, but after a few seconds' consideration takes back the words "truculent" and "feminist". In fact, he tells me, of all the words he used, "feminist" was the one his wife would find "most insulting". Throughout her life, Jane has passionately believed that her place has been as a full-time wife and mother in the home, and that the feminist movement got it all wrong by encouraging women into the workplace at the expense of family life. Clare admits to being utterly dependent on his wife, having met her at UCD when he was just 19 years old. They married in 1966, following a summer in which Clare, as a resident in a US psychiatric hospital, came as close as he ever has to a nervous breakdown.
When he met Jane, Clare had a precedent for loving women with fight. While his father, a state solicitor with the land registry, was "gentle" and "a romantic", his mother was a woman to be reckoned with and "stronger" than his father. "I was more afraid of my mother, who had a fairly explosive temper. She'd whack you, never in cold blood. She was a passionate woman - about everything," he says.
Clare says that "physically I am like my father, but I have a lot of my mother's passion. She was very argumentative. I am very argumentative behind the urbane face." Clare's early life was also dominated by two older sisters - Wyn, a draftswoman with RTE and Cablelink, and Jan, a nurse at Our Lady's Hospital, Crumlin.
Some say that as a psychiatrist, he has sometimes appeared to feel threatened by women colleagues and patients with challenging ideas. "I'm not surprised to hear that," he responds. "It's certainly possible. It's like racism. I am contaminated by patriarchy; there is no man who isn't."
But he says he gets on better with female patients than male ones, which is interesting considering the subject of his latest book. Female colleagues, too, have both engaged and informed him. A woman partly inspired the book: Lesley Rees, to whom Clare refers often and generously, is a "very powerful" endocrinologist and former colleague of his at St Bartholomew's in London. Rees's knowledge of hormones and behaviour drew Clare to the conclusion that it is not testosterone that makes men violent; it merely aggravates aggression that is already there.
The origin of much rage and violence is in the way we conceptualise what it means to be a man or a woman. Men are physically stronger and "more alive", says Clare, and have used this advantage to achieve dominance. If they were similarly conditioned, women would be violent too, he asserts.
The book came out of discussions with Rees and originally she was to be co-author, but then, Clare says, "it was thought that a book about men should be written by a man".
There is hope for men only if they "acknowledge the end of patriarchal power and participate in the discussion of how the post-patriarchal age is to be negotiated," Clare believes. He is dissatisfied with the conclusion of the book, but he was under a lot of pressure to finish it, on top of all his other work. At least he's starting the discussion.
On the way home from St Patrick's Hospital Dublin, I ask the taxi driver (female) whether she thinks that men are in crisis because strong women are taking over and don't need them anymore. She thinks about it. Mentions a little boy she knows who is being reared by a single mother who is very tough on him. She wonders if the boy is lacking the soft mothering he needs. Yes, she concludes, life is more difficult for men now.
By the way, she wants to know, who is Anthony Clare? After 90 minutes of grilling him (and 12 years of conversing with him as a journalist), I'm still not sure I can answer that question.
On Men: Masculinity in Crisis is published by Chatto & Windus, £17.99 UK
