John Boorman has lived and filmed in Ireland since the early 1970s, but rarely tackled Irish subjects. After the success of his collaboration with Brendan Gleeson on the Martin Cahill biopic The General, Boorman is back on home soil for The Tiger's Tail, a scathing, pull-no-punches portrayal of contemporary Ireland. The 73 year-old director tells Hugh Linehan where the country has gone right - and horribly wrong

A FEW weeks ago, Irish newspapers carried reports of a speech supposedly given by John Boorman in Dublin at a preview of the 73-year-old director's new black comedy, The Tiger's Tail. As it happens, Boorman wasn't actually there, and the words were read out by an actor - appropriately enough, given the film's themes of deception and unreality in contemporary, boomtime Ireland.

The text included a list of paradoxical juxtapositions about the country we live in.

"The affection for children and their sexual abuse.

"Poets and scholars and the highest illiteracy rate in Europe

"The 'traffic jam' postcard showing sheep blocking a road and Pearse St today.

"A blue-eyed, black-haired Galway girl and a dyed blonde in an SUV with a phone glued to her ear.

"The anonymous generosity that fills the collection boxes outside the supermarket and the fat-cats who only give when they can be seen to be giving.

"The rule of law and the grotesque rule of lawyers.

"Stunning landscapes and the plague of ugly bungalows."

"My intention was not to say: this is what it used to be, which is good, and this is what it is now, which is bad," says Boorman over a bowl of soup in his local pub deep in the Wicklow mountains. "All those things coexist; it's the good and the bad, struggling for dominance."

We hear a lot from our Minister for Arts, Sport and Tourism about the importance of Irish film-making in attracting tourists to this country. But The Tiger's Tail, I suggest, could have been conceived with the objective of discouraging people from coming anywhere near the bloody place. Boorman laughs.

"I don't think you can look at it like that, can you? But it was interesting; we tried to get money from this new fund [ run by the Broadcasting Commission of Ireland], where you have to show that it's culturally important or of value. They turned my script down because they said that this could have happened in any city."

Which is rather strange. Whatever audiences may make of The Tiger's Tail when it opens here in two weeks, it's hard to think of another Irish film which is so relentlessly specific in its depiction of contemporary Dublin: gridlocked traffic; rampant property speculation; corrupt politicians; drunken vomiting and violence on the streets; a collapsing health service; an epidemic of young male suicides. The compendium of social ills is utterly familiar.

The Tiger's Tail opens on a traffic jam. Atomised commuters inch along in their glass and metal bubbles while, outside, the homeless loom like bad dreams. For millionaire property developer Brendan Gleeson, the dream turns worse when one of those looming faces turns out to be his own. As he finds himself being stalked by a mysterious and malevolent doppelganger, his business faces disaster when plans to build a national stadium are stymied by a rival developer who has outbid him for the services of a corrupt government minister.

The standard defence against the critique embodied in The Tiger's Tail is that these are "the problems of prosperity". So what does Boorman make of the economic surge which has improved many Irish people's lives in recent years?

"I have very mixed feelings," he says. "I think the dynamics and the prosperity are invigorating. When you look at the IFSC and all those buildings, there's a certain exhilaration. And then I suppose, like everyone else I worry about the bubble bursting. You just hope we're building up enough solid stuff in terms of industry and commerce."

He is more concerned about the social and emotional consequences. "It's complicated. A lot of stuff from the past has erupted and is emerging in different ways. I don't know. I'm speculating, really. But I think that what's happening is that boundaries have gone, and there's a sense that everything is possible in Ireland in all kinds of ways. What is being built now is without foundations somehow. It's probably going to be another generation before Ireland begins to find a new identity and has some kind of structure and boundaries to it."

The resulting lack of structure, he says, is alarming. "People don't seem to have any ideology or any sense of conscience. You see the accumulation of enormous wealth." He recalls sitting next to billionaire Dermot Desmond at a lunch. "I asked him where he lived now. He said: 'Oh, I live in cyberspace'. I asked if it had a constitution 'No', he said. 'That's why I'm there.'"

The central idea of the story, of identical twins separated at birth, has fascinated Boorman since 1975, when a change in the law in Britain allowed people who had been adopted to trace their parents.

"Many identical twins who had been separated at birth were able to meet their twins for the first time," he says. "I'm the father of twins, and I've always been fascinated by them. I remember my daughter when she was about four, saying to a friend: 'It must be strange to be alone in the world.' As a twin, you never are."

Living in Los Angeles at the time, Boorman prepared a film treatment on the subject. "I wrote it for Jack Nicholson to play the two roles," he says. "And then other things happened and I kind of forgot about it." Many years later, the idea re-emerged, but in a very different context. "I wanted to do something about contemporary Ireland, and Dublin, and I put these two things together. I felt that the notion of identity was at the centre of it."

So Boorman created the character of Liam O'Leary (Gleeson), a bluff, self-made millionaire who suddenly discovers that everything he thought he knew about himself is wrong. "He doesn't know who he is, in the same way that Ireland has lost its identity, or is searching for an identity. I thought you could bring that out through twins. What is it that makes them separate? In a way, the heart of the thing is a line in the film: if you can be somebody else, does that mean the person you used to be is dead?"

Given that he's been living here for a mere 35 years, some may bridle at Boorman's unsparing critique of his adopted country. But, as he points out, given our demographics, most Irish-born people haven't lived here as long. I wonder whether whatever brought him here all those years ago has now disappeared forever.

"Well, I didn't want to go back to England after living in the States," he recalls. "And I didn't want to live in Los Angeles. So that was how I came to be here. I still find England in many ways intolerable. I suppose for whatever reasons I first came, I'm now so involved and rooted here that I don't think about moving away, I just think about putting up with it. I have so many friends and relationships here.

"The thing that always appealed most to me about living in Ireland was the personal nature of it; that, because it was so small, everything could be done on a personal basis. Including meeting Charlie Haughey. I knew him quite well, and the fact he was so accessible - and Garret Fitzgerald. All of them were. The country's small enough that you can know everybody, and I like that very much. But Dublin has become much less friendly, hasn't it? It was a very special place, as a town to go into, to meet people. It's lost a lot of that charm."

Among the many symptoms of social dysfunction in the film, the subject of young male suicide crops up.

"The preferred method is hanging," says Boorman. "There's something awfully brutal about that. You must have a sort of self-disgust to hang yourself. I have a line in the film, whether it's true or not, where the priest [ Ciaran Hinds] says they're our suicide bombers, protesting at what we've become as a society."

Another subplot concerns a homeless shelter run by the priest, who's an old schoolfriend of Gleeson's character. "When I was researching, I went around homeless shelters a lot, and also squats," says Boorman. "There is this dissociated generation; mostly boys who've had a row with their parents or whatever. Interestingly, what I found about them was that they were very sweet. They weren't aggressive or hostile, they were quite gentle, a bit confused. They didn't know what to do, how to conduct their lives.

"Of course, they all have different stories, but there's a feeling that there's all this money, which attracts them, but they don't know how to become part of it. And the homeless shelters are now all being flooded by migrant workers. It was quite fascinating, to be a tourist in this underbelly of Dublin."

Earlier this year, just before shooting began on The Tiger's Tail, Brendan Gleeson made a memorable appearance on The Late Late Show, when his searing anger at the treatment of a dying relative by the health system was electrifying. Not surprisingly, that subject shows up in the finished film. "I had already written the script," says Boorman. "And Brendan kept saying to me: 'don't forget to make that scene terrible'. I'd been around all the A&Es, and I have to tell you we played it down. Some of the things I experienced were horrifying. The notion of attacking nurses and doctors is pretty awful."

This is the fourth film in a row that Gleeson has made with Boorman, following The General, The Tailor of Panama and Country of My Skull. "Acting is an extraordinary thing with him," says the director. "When my friend and neighbour Daniel Day Lewis does a part he immerses himself in it. He uses the accent all the time when he's off the set. That's his method and it's a very effective one. But Brendan can slip in and out of character. It's almost childlike. Children can pretend in and out in a flash. That's a quality that some actors have."

It's 57 years since Boorman made his first film, a three-minute short. Despite the gruelling nature of the process, he has no intention of stopping.

Clint Eastwood is 76, and [ Portugese director] Manoel de Oliveira is 97. "When they talk about making a film, people always think of the shooting period. It takes you a couple of years to make a film and, of that, only eight weeks is spent shooting it. It is very demanding. Fortunately I'm quite fit, so that so far hasn't been an issue. What is difficult, when you're making independent films, is raising the finance and then getting distribution, which gets more and more difficult. Clint Eastwood is 76, and [ Portugese director] Manoel de Oliveira is 97.

"I have to say, when I was making this film, shooting nights up in the Wicklow mountains with blinding snow in the face, I did ask myself the question, what am I doing? And I suppose the answer is really that I don't know what else to do. To sit down with an idea and write a script and then finish up with a film - there's still something compelling about it for me."

The Tiger's Tail is released on November 10th