The backdrop was a subdued Bloomsday, over which the Haughey funeral cast a pall, but no words were wasted when writers Anne Enright and Roddy Doyle met for a public interview at the Dublin Writers' Festival, writes Eileen Battersby, Literary Correspondent

Roddy Doyle is no eejit. You don't spend 14 years as a teacher without learning a trick or two about crowd control and letting everyone know that even the most benign tolerance is finite. He is sharp, as quick as his characters, more than forthcoming and very conscious of having become a professional, career writer who spends his days working in the attic.

Throughout his conversation with Anne Enright at the Dublin Writers' Festival recently, his answers were developed, often amusing and always to the point.

Here is a man who doesn't ramble and doesn't waste either words or breath, as the woman from the floor who told him she hadn't liked The Commitments and expected him to respond to this, was quick to discover.One man in the audience keen on asking Doyle about religion and churches was also quickly headed off at the pass. "I'm an atheist," said Doyle, complete with a fully formed full stop, while the English visitor who decided that Doyle was a man of the people with an obvious future in politics, was not encouraged to elaborate. Doyle's pained "don't even go there" grimace was sufficient.

It was a surprise to hear Doyle remarking that he has been compared with Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, but as expected, he stressed his abiding love for, and enjoyment in, Dickens, the consummate story teller.

In the slightly surreal aftermath of the Charles Haughey funeral, which though uniting poor Paddy Dignam and the former taoiseach in death, had certainly subdued Bloomsday, Anne Enright began to quiz Roddy Doyle about Dublin.

But first, personal belief and a sense of occasion prompted her to tell him, "You're a Joycean", and she elaborated, "You love women, you love creating women", and she praised his ability to get inside a character, "you're not being a bloke."

No one could dispute that with Paula Spencer, the narrator of The Woman Who Walked Into Doors, Doyle had created a three-dimensional individual torn between her romantic memories and the desperate reality of what really happened.

He also pointed out the different, stronger Paula who had evolved from Ger Ryan's interpretation and he said that he was conscious of not allowing this to influence his characterisation. "I didn't want to have to 'novelise' her." In keeping with the theme of a changing Dublin, he remarks on the way it used to be when Paula went off to work. "She and the other cleaners would have some fun on the way. She knew these women." That has all changed now.

PAULA TRAVELS TO work in the company of Nigerian women. She doesn't know any of them. "She's far more alone now, there's less to share."

The sequel to The Woman Who Walked Into Doors is due out in September ("I've come back to her"), and marks Doyle's return to home territory having ventured abroad in the first two parts of his trilogy, the final volume of which he is thinking about.

He is thinking many things. For a writer who has always listened to, and looked at, people - "I love the sound of voices" - he is also becoming stronger in memory and many of his observations indicated an awareness of time passing.

He said there is always some humour and pathos involved when a man or a woman of a certain age looks in the mirror. He also commented on the increasing number of "wrecked, baldy old guys" who come up to him in the street and it turns out "I used to teach them."

He has long since given up teaching, but still lives only four miles from the school. His teaching experience made him a writer. "Do you do much research?" asked Enright, "I was a teacher," he replied.

For all the light-hearted banter and the fact that although Enright may come across as a harassed housewife on temporary day release from her children and complains "I've no time to read", she is shrewd, alert and knows how to turn an interview into an apparently casual conversation. She is also asking Doyle the right questions.

He probably hates interviews and must have been asked every question about a million times by now, but is astute and draws in darker aspects such as encountering recovering heroin addicts who are the ghosts of young kids he used to teach.

Again, on the subject of time passing, he has shown how it affects his characters. Paula's son who was a little boy jumping around the place in The Woman Who Walked Into Doors, is now a recovering addict and is described in the new book as sitting absolutely "still". Doyle explains that for any recovering drug addict there is no freedom of movement.

"I'd love to live in New York," Doyle said as though the thought had suddenly struck him, but knows he can't uproot his children at this stage.

One of the aspects of the changing Ireland he loves is his new freedom, "I can walk down the street without every tenth person asking me if I'm Roddy Doyle".

He mentions that sometimes he's the only person on the bus who speaks English and then adds in passing, "I'm learning Polish."

Though a famously direct individual, Doyle favours heavy irony, and he is equally capable of saying that all this multiculturalism is as exciting as I know he thinks it is - or that it is just a downright pain in the butt. He likes keeping people on their toes, this was a teacher only the most committed messer would dare cross.

ENRIGHT BRINGS UP something that was new to me, but well-known by many others, the fact that the writer Maeve Brennan, one of the New Yorker magazine literary stable, was the cousin of Doyle's mother. For some five months, when Doyle was about 14, Brennan lived in the family home. He remembers her as "incredibly elegant and eccentric", bewildered by an Ireland she no longer knew. He admits that he didn't speak to her about writing, because he wasn't interested in it at that time.

For all the talk of working-class literature, Enright draws the discussion to the emergence of an underclass. It is a valid distinction between working class and underclass. The reality of a changing Dublin within a changing Ireland is the stuff of many a thesis yet to be written.

Doyle is particularly aware of the linguistic confidence of the working classes. "A well-aimed working-class insult can do in two sentences what it would take a barrister three days to do."

Both he and Enright shake their heads over what they see as the ongoing stupidity of The Irish Times, all that is wrong in society is invariably reflected in its cosy pages. They also agree that there are currently 40 good Irish writers and no good literary critics, "the film critics are even worse."

Various names of Irish writers are shouted up from the audience, and the expected are praised. One of the less expected but welcome names is that of Jennifer Johnston. Asked about her work, Doyle's reply is a full-hearted "I love it." He makes it clear that he believes that the duty of the writer is to produce good work.