There are no agendas, no literary rivalries, no scores to settle, no complaints about unrecognised genius. Benedict Kiely, as a writer, is content without being complacent. As a man, he is much the same, uncomplaining as ever, though he now concedes: "I feel more like 80. There's a slowing down all right, everything takes longer. You are no longer what you once were."

In a world of egos, particularly as intense as those of the Irish literary scene, Kiely has always been popular and has never had any difficulty accepting people and events as they are. He has a kind word for everyone. As for the vagaries of life itself, he has always been philosophical and says: "Well, there's not much you can do about some things. You can't change them happening." He will be 80 on August 15th and he says: "I hope it is a better one than last year - last year was the day of the Omagh bombing - that was a terrible, terrible crime."

Ten years have passed since I last interviewed him. The small drawing-room in his downstairs flat in Donnybrook, where there lingers an air of modest refinement, remains as ordered as ever. The walking stick has become more important. There is a large clay head of Kiely and, as is so often the case, it does not look like him. Neat stacks of books are arranged on the table, alongside three pieces of sculptural poetry. His reading consists of new books - "though not as much now, as I'm not reviewing, it becomes harder to keep up with everyone" - and selected titles for re-reading. A copy of Crime and Punishment rests on the top of one pile. Don de Lillo's Underworld is also prominent. "I liked it a lot. It's really very good."

As for his own writing, a second volume of memoirs will be published on his birthday. He jokes about the title, The Waves Behind Us, which comes from a line of Coleridge: "When you consider the meaning, `The light which experience gives us is a lantern on the stern which shines only on the waves behind us', all it's saying is that experience is no use to us. It only helps us with what has happened." There is also a large volume of his selected essays on Irish writers due from Cork University Press in September. "And I've three novels, God help us, all unfinished." The large roll-top desk by the window continues to dominate the room. Kiely acknowledges its presence. "I've had it about 50 years. Yes, it's been a useful weapon."

As the long-lived son of long-lived parents, and the father of four, he recently suffered the death of his eldest daughter, Mary, at 53. "I miss her very much, she was always on the phone, we had great chats." He lapses into silence. Kiely, the most approachable of men, seldom allows his feelings to express themselves fully. He has always sustained a friendly dignity.

Born in Dromore, Co Tyrone, in 1919, the youngest of six, Kiely grew up in nearby Omagh. It is a place which is never far from his conversation or his work. The unmistakable voice, the accent of which he has described as "mournful Scots-Irish", evokes images of the Clogher Valley regardless of what subject he happens to be discussing. His father was in the British army. "He fought in the Boer War," says Kiely, "he was a lovely man. He had also been around the world, he had seen things." Did he have many stories about the war? "He told us things, not that they were ever blood red or anything like that, but he had his stories."

Whatever about his father's stories, Kiely has a good one of his own. "He never fired a shot, except for one and father always said that was at a black snake, `I never knew whether I hit or missed - but I tell you this I walked six times around South Africa'." Kiely's mother, Sarah Gormley, a member of a family which often features in Kiely's memories, was equally quick witted.

The Omagh of his day was a garrison town - both the Royal Irish Fusiliers and the Royal Inniskillings were stationed there. Not that the young Kiely was ever drawn to the army. He did well at school. "I always had a good memory. Now if I want to remember something - God Almighty, I have to look up my own memoirs - but I could remember bits of things with ease, and I was always good at English, composition in particular, I wrote very long essays - often up to 25 pages." His memory is still better than most. He says he was always considered to be at the mercy of his imagination.

Writing came naturally enough to him, starting with schoolboy poetry, and for more than 50 years he has been able to describe himself as a professional writer, having had a long career in journalism as well as being the author of novels and short stories. But no Kiely interview is straightforward. The facts of his career and early life are well known, he makes no attempt to disguise the fact that he is far more interested in the people he has encountered than he is in himself.

"Those books of memoirs I've written are really about the people I've met, wonderful people, many of them now sadly dead." He has never lost his curiosity. Kiely's most constant expression is one of mild wonderment. He has enjoyed his life and makes no apologies for it.

There is an extensive repertoire of anecdotes and stories featuring individuals who usually come complete with family histories. So many names of friends and acquaintances, at times it becomes possible to construct entire family trees. But there are also dramatic individuals with small walk-on parts such as a librarian in Limerick, Robert Herbert, who "looked like Don Quixote".

If Kiely has a fault it is that he is always so nice. In a world as cynical as this one, it would be difficult to meet anyone else who is as well disposed to mankind as he is. "I am mild," he agrees. "If I've met people I don't like they haven't made much of an impression on me. Either that, or I just didn't notice."

This is all the more impressive considering the years Kiely spent as a journalist. "I enjoyed it, they were great men to be with." Of his distant relative Flann O'Brien, he says: "He was fine. Of course he had his problems . . . " Almost as an afterthought he adds: "By God, he had an acidic tongue." Of Paddy Kavanagh, he says he was "charming and gentle . . . most of the time. Of course he was inclined to let a roar out of him but he was basically shy." Liam O'Flaherty impressed him as a fine novelist interested in troubled states of mind: "Yes, there's far more to him than people seem to think; those are sophisticated novels" and "do you know he was also the most handsome man you could see?"

Kiely's essays about Irish writers are by his own admission more celebratory than critical and their value lies in the sense he creates of the individual under scrutiny. A volume of the Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen seems to stand out among the other books on a shelf along the wall. Did he know her? "I did. She was very imposing, she had a great presence." On leaving school, Kiely worked in the local post office. "They were wonderful characters. It was great fun." Then he says, with a story teller's flourish: "Something very strange happened and I found myself thinking I was going to be a Jesuit. I'll swear to God - if there is a God - I didn't have a vocation," he says, not for the first time, but this did not prevent him from having a good time at the novitiate in Co Laois. Emo Park was situated in one of Ireland's great houses, Emo Court, which was begun by Gandon (see story below). Kiely recalls the beautiful parkland and particularly the yew trees.

Years later, a chance memory of his time there, the sight of a woman bathing naked in the lake, came back to him and he used it in his fifth novel There Was an Ancient House. The inclusion of that memory ensured the book was banned, one of a trio of his novels to be denounced as a danger to society. "If you weren't banned it meant you were no bloody good," he says and refers to being blacklisted as a type of literary badge of honour. "I was in good company, there's no doubt about that."

While at Emo, he had two life-changing experiences. Firstly, he discovered he would never be a Jesuit. Far more importantly, he aggravated an injury to his back, sustained two years previously during a street game of Gaelic. "I landed flat on my arse during the game. No one kicked me. I wasn't pushed. It was just an accident, but by God! . . . " he says with sufficient force to leave the sentence unfinished. Although it happened when he was 16, the pain went dormant for a couple of years and returned with a vengeance at Emo, resulting in an 18-month stay at Cappagh Hospital in Dublin. The time allowed Kiely to explore a quiet side of his nature, which - for all his socialising, drinking and obvious enjoyment of talking - he has always had. "It was wonderful in some ways. I had my own quiet spot. It was a children's hospital, you see, and I was treated as a gentleman." And he refers to the "wide, open-air balcony, from which he had a fine view of the hills beyond and of Dublin itself", described in Drink to the Bird. "I had to live on a thing they called a spine frame" - two parallel steel bars with canvas stretched tightly between them on which the patient lay flat - "I had this great surgeon, a Mr Henry Macauley. He was a very handsome man with grey black hair." Kiely pauses and looks at the ceiling as if the man were standing there. "He looked like a romantic hero, very much the part." His story, A Room at Linden, catches something of his experiences as a patient.

The time in hospital also meant he was hovering, as it were, on the fringes of the Dublin of which he would become a part. "I remember in 1932 coming to Dublin for the Eucharistic Congress. Now at that time I was very fond of Chesterson's writings." He describes being almost asleep when his attention was drawn to the fact that one of the canopy bearers was G.K. Chesterson.

Dublin has always delighted him. "I'm an Omagh man but I'm also a Dubliner. I was lucky I came down here as a young fellow and my sister Rita was already living here." He had developed a foolproof method for quickly learning the city's geography - by taking Nelson's Piller as a point of reference and making his way back from there.

On leaving hospital he returned briefly to Omagh and then came back to Dublin where he entered University College Dublin to study arts. It was not a casual decision. He had had to learn Irish.

While still at university he started writing for the Catholic Standard, having "written bits and pieces" before arriving at UCD. On graduating with a first, he took the time-honoured route open to clever graduates with civilised if useless arts degrees in English and history - he investigated journalism. He seems to have quickly developed a taste for reviewing and mentions his brief career as a film critic, resorting to writing reviews from press releases. Later, as a banned writer, he would find some members of the public took umbrage at his opinions as a theatre critic. He worked at the Irish Independent and then the Irish Press - where he was also literary editor for 14 years, having succeeded M.J. McManus whom he admired greatly. The newspaper world he describes sounds a wonderful place, populated by clever literary eccentrics without a businessman or computer in sight.

He could have stayed but in 1964 acted on Frank O'Connor's advice and headed for the US. "He thought at least there I'd get paid for my talk. Here it was just happening in the pubs." For the next five years he talked his way around the US, lecturing and being a professional literary man, while also holding a series of academic jobs. In 1970 he returned to Ireland. Many life changes had already been decided. He moved to Donnybrook - where he still lives with his long-time companion - and had already begun to see various friends die.

But the North is still home, so how does he feel about the political and cultural conflict? "It's what happens when empires collapse. Look at anywhere in the world where there has been an empire. It is always the same, the sad end of empire and the dung it leaves behind, a bloody mess. The poor Orange men want to keep the union - what union? What does it mean?" Kiely, for all his mildness, has been vocal in his opposition to the IRA and has received threats. "In no uncertain terms I told them, in Irish and English, to absent themselves," he laughs.

As a writer his prose style shares the colloquial, conversational quality of his speech. He agrees there is no agenda beyond telling stories based on "somewhere you have been, or something you have seen, or what you have felt". Is there a book he would most like to be remembered for? "I would have to think about that. I'm not sure." Far more pressing for him at the moment are the three unfinished novels. "It can be hard to finish a novel. I keep tinkering with them and I hope to have at least one of them finished. What can you do?"

Did he expect to live so long? Kiely, who has never suffered any serious illness, retains his thoughtful gaze, and says: "I never really thought about it. But you know there's nothing you can really do about it."

The Waves Behind Us - Further Memories by Benedict Kiely will be published on August 15th by Methuen at £15.99 in UK. It will feature as the Book On One, on RTE Radio One from August 9th 13th, at 2.45 p.m.