It's like being trapped in a time capsule, hermetically sealed from the hustle and bustle of an increasingly frenetic Dublin, as it approaches evening rush hour.

Senator Maurice Hayes sits in the bar having a relaxed conversation with someone before he leaves for his daily commute back to Down. Everything is very sedate and old-fashioned as Montague arrives with his wife, novelist Elizabeth Wassell. With his carrot-coloured jacket and his broad shoulders, he is both stately and bohemian, occasionally wearing a look of childlike amusement as we talk about the latest volume of his memoirs, The Pear is Ripe. It opens with him teaching English at Berkley in the '60s, while around him America opens up to the possibilities of free love, drugs and the birth of counter culture. This is followed by sojourns in a Paris fired up by the student protests of 1968 and the inclusion of a more reserved Dublin sandwiched between these two rebellious extremes.

How does he feel about the Dublin he finds himself in now. "I was thinking about that. I feel like an old bird that's been partly dislodged from its nest. Dublin has changed underneath me.

There's a kind of frantic air to the city, I find. I've been told to f*** off at least twice." He nods towards Elizabeth. "We were heading for a taxi, and we'd waved one down, and there were some young people who just moved in, and I tried to protest and they just said, 'F*** off!'" He delivers the expletive in a casual manner, with the air of someone covering their exasperation with baffled amusement. As I discover later in our conversation this attitude he has encountered isn't a once off.

He's not impressed with what he calls this "f*** off element" all too evident in the city.

It's a far cry from the Dublin he used to live in, which was "a sombre town. Extremely melancholy, but there was a slowmoving charm to it, and I just began to love the streets, and that kind of Georgian melancholy."

However, he stresses his fondness for the place . . . "I still love it" . . . and as he puts it, "There seems to be several Dublins now." Although, he is also aware of how it has moved on since his time here, remarking on its "northern borders" and the M50 as something "beyond my experience".

He was brought from his birthplace in New York to Tyrone at the age of four to live on his father's farm in the Clogher valley and after all his years of travelling you can still detect a subtle Northern burr in certain words. He never misses an opportunity to emphasise his Ulster background, claiming an implicit sense of distance while still expressing his affection for Dublin. He even refers to arriving in Dublin for the first time in the 1940s "after what you called the Emergency". The Pear is Ripe follows on from his first memoir, Company: A Chosen Life. Writing about his life, he says, is a way of "occupying time" and "if you've lived in important places and important times, as Mr Kavanagh said, you'd like to understand it through an effort of comprehension. And of course you're looking from your own point of view. You're one character in some kind of story, so you try to make sense of it. With all the possibility that you might be contradicted."

The effort of comprehension extends to one of the more colourful characters in his book, Charles Haughey. In an encounter at a dinner party, Haughey displays a rather insulting attitude towards Montague's first wife, Madeleine. I ask Montague how he managed to restrain himself, and he laughs: "I didn't want to wreck the dinner table by coming to blows with him. I was in my late 30s, early 40s, so I'd learned how to behave myself."

I put it to him that Haughey obviously hadn't learned how to behave himself. Montague responds by saying Haughey was a "complex character" and I question him as to what form this "complexity" took: "Well, I hope I've described it in the book, " he replies. "In a complicated way he was a reaction to Eamon de Valera. De Va l e ra presented himself as a broomstick with great probity, and you wouldn't think that anything had ever dirtied his mind. And he appealed to people like a great iconic character . . . and of course his home life was completely above reproach. But Haughey then was the opposite. He bred a new kind of Fianna Fail. And I think they're trying to tar Bertie with the same brush. But he's actually not the same kind of person. Haughey was a rogue, a real rogue." He chuckles nervously. "I shouldn't say anything about Bertie." I press him on the matter; "He's a gentler form of rogue, " is all he offers.

I ask him whether merely calling Haughey a rogue is just another way of letting him off the hook, "Yes, but he was capable.

And the things he did. In my back pocket, I have a travel pass. He helped to found Aosdana. It all improved the image of Ireland.

He came across to the world as a highly civilised man." He laughs at this. "Mr Haughey was a complicated character. I look forward to a good biography of him. But there's hardly anyone who could probably accomplish it. Of course the only person who could do it would be Anthony Cronin, but he's not going to do that. I think Tony knew him better than anybody. Or at least one side of him, and he persuaded him to do good things."

The book also contains a moving chapter about his final meeting with Beckett before his death. I ask him if he can explain the magnetic attraction Beckett had for fans and fellow writers alike. He narrows his eyes, looks up in the air and blinks, looking for a moment like the old bird he referred to earlier. "It's hard to answer that. First of all he was very handsome, in a strict kind of way. And also he was tremendously shy, and I think people are touched by that. But then after the first glass, " he chuckles, "he could hardly stop 17once he got started." He expands a bit more. "I think that's the characteristic of playwrights.

Brian Friel is very shy, although after he gets started you can hardly stop him too. Beckett was also very principled. If he prepared a play in a particular way he wanted it to be done like that, and he didn't like anything casual. I suppose one admires somebody who has total dedication."

I mention Beckett's dedication to his work above all else, to the exclusion of his magnetic character.

He nods, "Wordsworth once said that you take your work seriously but not yourself."But does he have any concerns about how his own work is perceived, and where it might ultimately be placed in the Irish literary canon? Is it something which preoccupies him? Again he chuckles . . . and there is a long pause as he looks around him searching for the words. "At the book launch I was thinking, in a room with people like Paddy Moloney and Seamus Heaney and Tom Kinsella and Louis le Brocquy, we're all part of a period, and part of each others' biographies. It's an interesting feeling."

As for the general status of poetry, there is a certain neglect creeping in which concerns him.

"It's not read as much as it should be. If it's read, then it's read for some extraneous reasons. I think that the reason Ted Hughes is read so much is that she [Sylvia Plath] committed suicide." He ponders for a moment. "Yes, I think it's for extraneous reasons."

And then he brightens: "But you go on working though." I ask him if he has a favourite poet. "I find Shakespeare's pretty good, " and he bursts out laughing, and those broad shoulders rock back and forth.

He seems more interested and more prepared to talk about the work of others rather than his own poetry. He is particularly enthusiastic about discussing the founding of Claddagh Records with Garech de Brun, which he also covers in his book. In his opinion the concept of the Fleadh Ceoil was a powerful force in Irish society and it allowed traditional music to flourish and give the country a revolutionary jolt of its own. "Musicians emerged from corners they'd been sent into, and you had a new generation in Ireland who were almost pleasure loving. And in the North they had begun marching, because they had real cause . . . 'one man one vote' . . . and the south was beginning to wake up to the idea of pleasure, and that they could enjoy themselves."

Montague believes in energy and for him the energy of Irish traditional music "helped to crack the shell of Irish Catholic puritanism". This belief extends to his poetry in which he tries to "see the world as a complex of energies, a dance of chance and necessity". He sees forces at work which bind everything.

"At times I think if there is a God then he's a giant spider, and he has this great web going, and we're all on the web, and you get an intonation now and again when it begins to shake. It's a sort of great web of the universe." For him the revolutionary ideals of the '60s were a perfect example of these forces at work, with their transference from the American West Coast and Columbia, right across to Paris and eastern Europe.

"I think Ginsberg was crowned the Queen of the May at Prague." He laughs at the absurdity of it; the culmination of an "energy transfer" in the crowning of arguably America's most influential modern poet in Europe.

But things are different now, and the energy of the '60s has dissipated, or perhaps been transformed into something different. "I feel that a commercial view of the world has come in, and everybody seems to be living through the banks, and there's a different attitude, as I said earlier a kind of 'f*** you' attitude." He gives a sigh of understanding, "It requires so much to keep going. It's harder to live in Ireland." He sees other changes and bemoans the dumbing down of newspapers, mourning the loss of "very serious, very readable papers" with long reviews which "replaced the Sunday mass for the Irish Catholic intellectual. I find most Sunday papers now . . . I'll have to excuse the Tribune . . . have no space for intellectual matters."

For him crassness, crudeness and philistinism seem to be everywhere, while the landscape takes on a bland uniformity which he and his wife find perturbing.

"A friend drove us down to Sligo recently for a reading. And driving back at night it was almost like driving through the States.

We bypassed a lot of the villages that I used to know, and there were sodium lights everywhere.

We hardly saw the country at all."

Maurice Hayes comes over to say hello at one point. There are handshakes, short but polite conversation, and Montague speaks warmly of him when he leaves.

It's the anthitesis of the rudeness and prevailing panic of urban life outside the hotel. After our interview I catch sight of Montague and his wife making their way up Baggot Street. The rush hour crowds are frantically trying to make their way home.

John Montague towers above them.