And I’m attracted to stories of violence, because it’s extremely alien to me. I’m interested in what drives people to extremes.”His own childhood was blissfully secure He was the third of six children. His father, Rory, was a TD (an Irish MP) and a former Minister of Health. The book moves through meetings, dance-halls, drinks, bus rides, sexual encounters and a rain of cliches, as Scully heads for self-destruction. The swoon and horror of teenage life howls auto-biographically from the pages.

It’s a surprisingly dark book to come from such an apparently sunny source.It’s causing him grief back home. “All these people in Carrickmacross are reading it and ringing me and saying, `Who’s this character?’ and `Who’s that meant to be?’ and, `Is this based on that?’ I’m saying, No, this happens in every small town in Ireland, if not the world. O’Hanlon has wrestled with his alternate love and contempt for his Monaghan township, and from the struggle has produced his first novel, The Talk of the Town (Sceptre, pounds 10). It’s a fusillade of venom at provincial life, a hymn to frustration set in the fictional town of Castlecock and narrated by Patrick Scully, aged 19, out of school and listlessly working as a Dublin security guard. His generation of teenagers went to the same disco-bop evenings on Saturday nights as every other bunch of teenagers, and dreamed of being different, getting away, counting for something.

It’s a far cry from Carrickmacross, the town in Monaghan where he was born, 32 years ago, where he and his neighbours knew each other’s movements like they knew the stains on their kitchen walls. Now I come home to Dublin and they’re doing it, too.”For the past four years, while pursuing his stand-up career and learning to live with a dog-collar, he’s lived in Crouch End, the fashionable north London suburb where, famously, Bob Dylan once came house-hunting. And his conversation is almost entirely serious, with little flashes of satire.”This,” he says looking round the Clarence’s pastel decor, “is one of the few bars in Dublin that doesn’t have pots and pans all over the wall. You know why? Because Dublin, unbelievably, has imported the idea of the Irish theme bar from England The theme bar was something I ran a mile from in London. The episode featuring Eoin McLove (an emetically bland TV entertainer based on Daniel O’Donnell) in which Eoin and Dougal played pat-a-cake in the bathroom, revealed his true nature as a six-year-old boy He .. The van driver walks back in “Are you from The Independent?” Good God, it’s him But Ardal O’Hanlon looks nothing like Father Dougal His short hair is gelled His glasses are crucial His clothes are dark blue and black His skin is deathly pale His demeanour is friendly but wary.

He goes out again.O’Hanlon’s trademark is a surprised-pigeon stare of apprehension, and a way of carrying himself that suggests a man in a neck-brace. He has the unblinking, tactless, unimpressed gaze of a child. Dougal is an innocent, bewildered by the sophisticated world. He is baffled by sex, terrified of women, doubtful about religion and confused as to whether the cows he sees in a field are a) small or b) far away.