Roddy Doyle is one of the most successful Irish writers ever, a Booker Prize winning author and an award winning screenwriter. So he was not best pleased when he was given the cold shoulder in RTE over a year ago.

He kept the rebuff to himself at the time ... but now his annoyance at what happened has come out in the current issue of Film Ireland magazine.

In a lengthy discussion between several writers about the the trials of writing for the screen, Doyle tells the story of how he had gone to RTE to pitch an idea for a new project but, he says, the reaction he got was "a little bit snooty".

"I had a meeting in RTE about a year and a half ago and to say it didn't go well would be an understatement. I felt very quickly it was a job interview and I wasn't going to get the job, you know, so I said, 'f *** it'.

"The project may not have been for them, that's grand, but I thought the whole tone was that no project was going to be for them."

"Obviously there are two people and I'm on one side of the desk and the other person on the other side of the desk could have an entirely different interpretation. But I just thought, if I'm going to write for telly again, it won't be through that door."

So it sounds very much like he will not write for RTE again, unless there is a radical change of attitude at the station.

This declaration of a boycott by Doyle caused some raised eyebrows in literary circles here this week, but little surprise. Doyle is well known for being prickly. He does not suffer fools gladly. He is extremely generous with his time for causes he believes in (like Amnesty) but he is notoriously short-tempered with timewasters, with those who he feels are not qualified to discuss his work.

It is possible to see his stand-off with RTE in two ways. The bitter word in some quarters this week (and the literary world is full of begrudgers) was that this was a case of how the mighty had fallen. Some of Doyle's recent books have not done as well as his earlier novels. His star is in decline, it was said, and he was frustrated at not being treated in RTE with the deference he has come to expect.

The other view, the majority view by far, was that Doyle has a track record that deserves respect and that the RTE Drama Department is well known for its poor handling of our best writers. "Why do we never see plays by Tom Kilroy, or Frank McGuinness or Bernard Farrell?" one writer asked. "When did Hugh Leonard last have a play on RTE? These are world class writers but they never get their work on RTE. There's something very wrong out there."

One friend of Roddy Doyle said that with the body of work he has behind him "he deserved to be treated in a certain way by RTE" and clearly this did not happen. One of the biggest successes ever on RTE was The Family, the searing four part drama by Doyle about the abusive husband Charlo, his wife Paula and their children, living in a tough estate in Dublin. RTE did put in some money for the right to show the drama before BBC, but the hugely successful series was commissioned and financed mainly by the BBC.

The brooding, explosive Charlo (played by Sean McGinley) and the fearful, depressed wife Paula (played by Ger Ryan) burned themselves into the consciousness of the country when the drama was shown in 1994, leading to an outcry and a national debate about wife-beating. Paula's excuse for her bruises (that she "walked into a door") subsequently became the title for Doyle's best-selling novel The Woman Who Walked into Doors.

"When have we seen a drama on TV with a similar impact?", one writer asked this week. "Roddy Doyle is a major talent and it's a disgrace that more of his work is not on RTE".

Doyle's ability as a writer for stage, television and the big screen can hardly be in question. His screenplay for The Commitments won a Bafta award and the film of his book went on to be a huge international success.

As a novelist, he is one of the most successful Irish writers of all time. His Barrytown trilogy about life on Dublin's northside, The Commitments, The Snapper and The Van, were all bestsellers and were all made into films.

He won the Booker Prize in 1993 for Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, another bestselling novel, recreating the world from the perspective of a ten-year-old boy. The Woman Who Walked into Doors (the book appeared two years after the TV series) won him lavish praise for his ability to get inside the mind of a woman caught in an abusive relationship and he revisited the character a decade later in the book Paula Spencer to see how her life had worked out.

Recent novels (A Star called Henry and Oh Play That Thing) took the hero from the GPO in 1916 to a life in America and received mixed reviews and had weaker sales. But he has also had huge success with plays, children's books, a non-fiction book about his parents, Rory and Ita, and another film called When Brendan Met Trudy.

When the story about his RTE snub broke earlier this week, Doyle was not in Dublin. He was taking part in the little known Palestine Literary Festival in Bethlehem and Ramallah, which is typical of him. He was unavailable for comment over the past couple of days as he was making his way home, but he rarely comments on stories like this anyway, regarding the media with a slightly jaundiced eye.

A friend of Doyle's says this is partly due to shyness. "He is not a very sociable person. He finds the literary merry-go-round tiresome and refuses to do it. He does not go to literary lunches with critics or other book launches and he does the absolute minimum even when it comes to promoting his own books."

The picture that comes across is of a very private individual, who is very serious about his work and has a strong belief in the value of what he does.

These days Doyle still lives on the Dublin northside, but in a nice house on a leafy road in Clontarf rather than in anywhere like Barrytown. He is "comfortable" according to those who know him rather than being fabulously wealthy. He did not figure in the recent Rich List which revealed that Cecelia Ahern was worth €7 million, but he has more than enough to be able to relax and only do and write what he wants to.

The political awareness and social conscience (as well as the sense of humour) that underlay the Barrytown trilogy are still there in spite of his success. His visit to Palestine this week and his ongoing work for Amnesty are just two of many signs of this.

And it is noticeable too in the fact that although he rarely says yes to requests from national newspapers for articles by him or interviews with him, when he was asked by Metro Eireann, the small paper for immigrants, he agreed not to do just one story but a whole series of stories. The series was republished as a book, The Deportees, a few months ago.

Nor should anyone be surprised at how frank he was about his treatment by RTE, although he had no way of knowing that a recording of a round table discussion he had with other writers at a small Film Ireland event would end up getting such wide coverage.

The same sort of thing happened to him in 2004 at a literary event in New York to celebrate James Joyce. "Ulysses could have done with a good editor," Doyle told the stunned audience at the relatively small gathering. "You know people are always putting Ulysses in the top 10 books ever written but I doubt that any of those people were really moved by it. I only read three pages of Finnegans Wake and it was a tragic waste of time," he added.

That started an earlier row. Clearly he is not afraid to speak out and say what he thinks. RTE be warned!

- John Spain