REJECTION has been the making of Dublin-born writer Sebastian Barry, whose fourth novel The Secret Scripture has just been published.

In the 1970s, long before his writing career blossomed, Sebastian graduated from Trinity with an arts degree. Like many hungry graduates, he applied for jobs -- two in particular: one was in Fred Hanna's bookshop; the other was in the financial services centre. The book shop turned him down and the financial services centre told him that they were very charmed by his letter but that he was the least qualified person who had ever applied for a job there.

At 52, with a fine body of work to his name, not to mention awards, the novelist and playwright can laugh at this now, relieved to have escaped a profession he was clearly not cut out for.

"I'd probably have been locked away in an institution a long time ago if I'd had to do that. Yeats said that he was a fool everywhere except at his desk, and I understand what he means."

Back then, Ireland was a grey place with high unemployment and bleak prospects. Emigration seemed the inevitable choice. Sebastian left his family home in Monkstown and headed for Paris with his girlfriend of the time.

With £40 to their name, they lived in a garret and survived on vegetables. She taught English while he stayed home and wrote all day. Eventually, he came back to Dublin and some of his short stories were published.

"I was seven years as a young man with the rejection slips. But the important thing was to do your work and to have it to do."

His parents, who eventually separated, were hard workers, too.

"My father [Frank Barry] is an architect and part of the tragedy of some professions in Ireland at that time was that there was no money in the country, so you couldn't do the things that were in you to do."

Creativity came from both sides of Sebastian's family. His mother was the actress Joan O'Hara who died last year and his aunt is the harpist and singer Mary O'Hara.

"What I admired about my mother was that she had her work, through thick and thin, except when we were small. [He is one of three children.] She was one of those actors who was always working. Similarly, Mary, who behaved in an heroic and celestial way when her sister was ill -- that was something to behold -- Mary did her work. She had her own BBC programme when she was 17. She coped with it and when her husband died, she went to a convent. [She wrote her biography later on -- Scent of the Roses.]

"Mostly, her work was received with enormous adulation, her and The Clancy Brothers. I actually have her harp in the house so that my son, Toby, could learn to play it. That's where she made her life, out of nothing.

"With writing, you're making something out of where there was nothing before."

In The Secret Scripture, Sebastian mines his own family history, as he has done in many of his works -- A Long Long Way, The Steward of Christendom and Prayers at Sherkin. Even in his recent play, The Pride of Parnell Street, he weaves in parts of his life from when he and his wife Ali lived on North Great George's Street for seven years.

His latest novel is about a woman called Roseanne Clear who is committed wrongfully to a mental hospital. A psychiatrist is sent in to assess her, and gradually we learn versions of her life, as he muses on his own misgivings, too. It is a beautiful book about human frailty and mistakes people live to rue. The bud of the story came from the tale of Barry's own great aunt.

"I don't know the name and she was certainly covered over, except the anecdotes would keep prising through the cover. People would not be able to help themselves saying certain things, like my grandfather saying to my mother, 'She was no good'. Not that she was mad, but that she was no good, morally. My grandfather's brother married her."

When Sebastian was a third of the way through writing The Secret Scripture, his mother became ill.

"I can't talk about my mother because I don't know what to say about her. This book is completely bound up with her being ill. I thought that I would put it aside, but I am like an African writer, whose many, many stories from her have become books and plays; no matter that our relationship was complicated and difficult in the last couple of years, nevertheless it is a last book, something which she has given me.

"The last years of her life were very confusing for her and in many ways tragic. They say that grief is two years long and I still don't know what to say. It's just that when she was ill in hospital, I used to get into the car. Ali, my wife, would say, 'Come on. It's two hours' drive and you were in yesterday', but you simply had to get in the car and drive across Dublin and go into the blasted room, just to make sure she was still there.

"And that is an incredible thing. Your mother or father being mortally ill shows you very simple primal things which you didn't know existed. In those moments, it's as if for the first time you realise that it's your mother and that you are a son. It's like an angel re-stating the conditions of this relationship.

"And yet you become lost in all sorts of grown-up things, careers and working together. She's so fantastically amusing and everyone loves her and she is fiery and wonderful and yet there's something much more precious right in the heart of that, it's that simple eternal thing that is the little chip in our DNA, which not only explains the part of your life but the importance of that part of your life too.

"You're reminded that this person gave you life. It's something to do with all the other people who came before you and all the other people who are going to come after you."

He visited his mother and learnt little hospital duties such as that, while she was there, her clothes needed to be taken home and washed. "I was surprised by the delicacy of her vulnerability and how you suddenly have to have the instincts of a dancer and you're called up to be adroit with her vulnerability, and do it well for her. Where's the manual? Because there's a big sign telling you to do it."

In many ways he is his mother's son. He walks just like Joan and he has her sense of wonder about the world. She used to write too. Sebastian speaks with great pride about his late mother and how she was working right up until the end. She had done a film with Noel Pearson -- How About You -- while in her wheelchair.

"It shows you the dedication of the woman," he says. Joan wanted to get her hair done as she thought Noel would be needing her for work around the film. So, Sebastian set about getting a hairdresser out to his mother in hospital, but each time she appeared, the hospital staff said that Joan was too unwell for that.

"She fell and cut her head and that was the end of it. She died shortly after that. We never got to the hair and it may seem like a tiny thing but I think you should clasp yourself to the little things, pay attention to them and the other things will look after themselves.

"People speak of my mother as if she was this comic person but she was deadly serious about her work and literature. She was a classical actress who loved Lorca and Yeats."

There is much to admire in Sebastian Barry the man. The compassion and humanity is not just in his writing but in his life too. Paul Durcan has written of how Sebastian spent long hours around Donal McCann's hospital bed, when he was in his final days. McCann had starred in The Steward of Christendom and had become a firm friend.

Barry lives in Wicklow with his wife -- Ali Deegan, an actress and screenwriter -- and their three children. The first time he met Ali he asked her for a loan of a fiver, he says.

Ali, he happily admits, is the woman who quelled his anxieties and opened him up to her Dublin Presbyterian world, a world which has informed his writing and helped him find his literary path. In short, she has been the making of him, creating their contented life.

"There is something in her that reminds me of the lost world where I was someone similar to her, where I was able to give everything to a relationship that was in front of me, whether it was my grandfather or mother or father, just unconditionally.

"And I hope that I've learnt enough from Ali to be able to do that with the children; because it's learned. We've come full circle. The reason I was so intrigued by that impulse to go and see my mother -- and I was also in a curious way proud of it -- was because it was so basically human."

"If you fear anything in yourself, you fear the lack of humanity that makes you go to make books about humanity, as if you're trying to put it back into yourself but it was there. It survived everything."

'The Secret Scripture' is the 'Book at Bedtime' on BBC Radio 4 starting April 28. Sebastian Barry is reading at the Cuirt International Festival on April 22 (www.galwayartscentre.ie). 'The Pride of Parnell Street' will tour Ireland in May. For details, visit www.fishamble.com.

- Ciara Dwyer