A YOUNG WOMAN DRIVEN

SHE was thrown in at the deep end, and it shows. Dervla Kirwan has grown up quickly. At 24 she has the grace, confidence - and experience - of many 10 years older. When she was 15, the nice middle class girl from, Churchtown, Dublin, was cast in a major role in the television series Troubles and has rarely been out of one spotlight or another since. The camera loves her, she can act, she's ambitious - and lady luck was an early friend.

Nonetheless, her career is refreshingly planned, so much so that as the shooting of the second series of the successful BBC series Ballykissangel wrapped at the weekend - the first series attracted audiences of 15.8 million the lead actress is not quite sure what the future holds: "there is no magic formula". She bade goodbye to the successful time travel TV series, Goodnight Sweetheart after the last series: "I'd had enough, really. It was important to move on after three years. You can be associated with playing one type of female and it is important to diversify".

Being typecast is something chat Dervla Kirwan is wary of and she has fought to break down the sort of barriers where Irish actors, working in Britain, find it difficult to be considered for non Irish roles. She seems to have made the break from the ethnic pigeonhole, and is well established as Phoebe, wartime, Cockney pub landlady and girlfriend of Nicholas Lyndhurst's 1990s time traveller in the comedy drama.

But her current role is actually as an Irish woman, who coincidentally also runs a bar, in the mythical Ballykissangel (played by Avoca in Co Wicklow) and who has a bantering screen relationship with the new young curate from England, played by Stephen Tompkinson (her real life boyfriend, adding a frisson to the plot, and juice to many a tabloid story).

Ballykissangel (or Ballykay as its inhabitants, and the cast and crew, call it) comes in a long line of gentle, rural, drama series set in an idyllic never neverland - from All Creatures Great and Small to Heartbeat - with quirky, likable characters and localised plotlines. "It's great to do something on my own turf, so to speak, and to play a woman who isn't a victim, isn't being raped, isn't being defined sexually, isn't a prop to make her older leading man look good. And she has a pair of balls and everyone likes that. I don't want them to ever dilute those characteristics about her.

"Ballykissangel has a 7.30 p.m. slot, so you're never going to have major revelations of sex, drugs and violence, but at least she's a strong role model and I just wish there were more.

She is radiant, petite, dark and graceful with attractive, expressive features. She gesticulates while she speaks, her voice regularly dissolving into warm laughter. And she looks even better on screen - the kind of appeal that a man of my acquaintance described as the sort of woman you could bring home to your mother, but who has a sultry, sexy quality beneath that. Beauty and intelligence.

Her appearance, as well as her Irishness, is a mixed blessing. Sometimes it can be hard, as a young, attractive woman, to be taken seriously. "It does annoy me when I walk into a room and there are six men over the age of 40 with, let's just say, a major gut problem, and they're saying `hang on there Dervla, don't eat your chocolate cake at dessert'." How does she react? "You just tell them to f--- off. But that's an insecurity in itself; it could be seen as a neurotic reaction. So you've just got to keep calm and cool. It's very hard. It doesn't matter how good looking or beautiful you are, you have to have an awful lot upstairs to play the game and I mean in the head, not in the chest."

She tells me later how, when she went for, an interview for one particular role, the director's eyes never left her breasts. "You've lost weight, Dervla," was his comment. She was so shocked at this appalling behaviour: that she was rendered speechless.

The struggle to break out of the mould as an Irish actress meant that being cast at 18 in Melvyn Bragg's notorious BBC drama A Time To Dance was a big break. "When I, was offered the job I thought, there are a lot of things within this that I don't really want to do. But I was an Irish actress, being offered a lead role in an English drama to play essentially an English character, and that was very big. And then in Goodnight Sweetheart I was cast as a Cockney barmaid - it was major not to be typecast as Irish. If I go into an interview speaking in my soft, Irish accent, that's it, the shutters come down and they think you can't do anything else, so it doesn't matter what accent you've done brilliantly on the box the night before..."

A Time to Dance was both a step forward and the source of huge negativity - the series was basically seen as a middle aged fantasy about a relationship with a young woman. Dervla correctly feels that the negative reaction was not directed at either herself or costar Ronald Pickup but at Melvyn Bragg (South Bank Show presenter) "because of the literary circles [he moves in]. I was only looking after my job, not the writing part of it."

That included naked love scenes with Pickup, which became a source of prurience for the tabloids. Even now she is clearly uncomfortable talking about it. "It was a very nasty way of attacking him because of who he is a very nasty media backlash against Melvyn Bragg.

She pauses. "I can't afford to focus on it. I've had six years of negative journalism attacking me personally about that and I have created a career for myself and I've gone on and I've survived and that's never ever been recognised ... I don't want it to sound like I'm bitching about Melvyn Bragg, because," she smiles, "I know him quite well. I answer things honestly; I don't really try to hide anything. That was a difficult time. I've had the rough with the smooth and much more rough to come." And she did move on to better things and better roles and has shown that she is made of tough stuff.

Performers, of course, always risk criticism. With negative reactions in general she tries "to bury my head in the sand and hope it was a period drama so no one will recognise me. If people think it's dreadful, they think it's dreadful. And if you think it's dreadful and you're working on it, it's very difficult. I never read the good press and never read the bad press. If you believe the good press you're finished. If you believe the bad press, you won't be able to continue."

DERVLA Kirwan has a facility for accents and, although there is no performing background in her family - some political involvement is the only thing close - she reckons that her mother, being a French and English teacher, may have something to do with it. "My parents have a brilliant ear for languages and mimicry and accents, which I think I've inherited - that I can listen to things and pick them up. I also inherited the habit of finishing people's, sentences, which I would like to eradicate.

She is the baby of the family - her father, who is retired, worked in insurance and her, two older sisters are "very funny, very supportive but very similar in temperament so we have the odd personality clash."

She went to drama classes till she was 15 but had no inkling of a dramatic career. Fate intervened when she read for a small part in Troubles. "I obviously read very well for a 15 year old. He [Brideshead Revisited director Charles Sturridge] was bowled over and I'm not . . . I'm telling it straight."

So she was taken to London for a screen test and ended up playing a major role when the series was eventually shot (with a different director). At 16 she got a part in the first Billy Roche Wexford play in London: "it was my first time on the professional stage". Then she got an agent and an Equity card.

She had just done her Inter Cert. "I had a taste for it and couldn't turn back. It was much more fun than being at school. So what do you do? You pursue it."

One of the things that people who know her say when you mention Dervla Kirwan is how she has her feet on the ground, how even at 15 she was able to hold it all together. "I was always quite mature as a child and as I get older I'm regressing."

She went on to work in the Druid Theatre and had a lead role in the Peacock at 18. Still she stayed at school and did her Leaving Cert. "My mother was a teacher and there was no way I wasn't going to finish school. I remember travelling by train to do my French and Irish orals and thinking `I can't cope'. But I had to, so I did it. Got it, did it and then was free to move on".

Later she got a place at Central Drama School in London but followed the advice of Noel Pearson: "He said `are you mad? There's no point going to drama school. You've got it; just keep working'". And so she did and made the move to London.

She coped with the conflicting demands of school and acting by "ignoring the upheaval and distraction and tried to focus on the two. I don't look back and think it was a bad time. It was a very, very exciting time - here was something that I was good at and that I enjoyed and that people paid me to do - it was great. It's all relative. I'll be 25 in October and I've been doing it now for nearly 10 years and it's really only beginning to happen properly for me now ... and I still have to put an awful lot of work in to create a stable environment for my 30s where I don't have to worry about my mortgage or my car.

"It will be hard work for the next five years and hopefully with a bit of luck it will happen. It's like having five numbers on the lottery and waiting for the sixth number to come up. You get scripts and by page 17 you think, this is absolutely dreadful. I could do an awful lot of drivel after this, but you have to enjoy your work, and be proud of it and bring your own dignity and integrity to it. They sound big words and they're very cliched but it takes a lot of guts to stand back from potentially, say, being financially very secure.

She didn't always want to be an actor, was shy and lacking in self confidence as a child and was terribly bullied at secondary school.

"Really all I needed was someone to point the finger and say you're good; you have the potential") She may have lacked the drive then but she's ambitious now. "I'm very, driven. I was brought up to feel that ambition was a dirty word, for a girl to say yes, I am ambitious. It was a negative quality to have, that there was something sinister and ruthless behind you in order to achieve your end.

"I'd like to create the right balance between being a nice person who won't shit on people but knows what she wants. It's that dilemma of being assertive without being called a bitch - the age old thing for any woman."

The insecurity of the profession is what drives her. Maybe because she made her own way in the world from such a young age: "I'm fiercely independent. I like to look after myself and the insecurity you have to take with the job. Paying the bills is a big reality at this stage of my career. But inevitably the work will run out for me when I reach my 40s, because that's the way things seem to be right now, though there are more female writers. You have to re invent yourself all the time and allow yourself to step back and reassess and not just get locked into the idea that you can't do anything else but the one thing. I think I will be able to diversify and be more versatile and try different avenues within acting.

She mentions writing, particularly for children's films or programmes, and radio, but would not like to direct "and certainly not produce".

Aside from that, her plans, her ambitions are simple: "I would like to work. I love work, and I don't ever want to stop working. I would like to do wonderful work, not necessarily always things that are a major commercial success. I would love to do more theatre; I'm mad about that. And look at the Liam Neesons and Gabriel Byrnes ... there, is Brenda Fricker and Fiona Shaw but there has to be a new generation of Irish actresses that Irish directors are prepared to back and give chances to.

"There are plenty of people that I'd love to work with - Jim Sheridan, Peter Sheridan, Neil Jordan - but you've got to be given the chance. I'm not trying to say I'm looking for a job, I'm not, but you've got to nurture talent. And it seems people have to move away and develop themselves, but it seems a shame."

She's come a long way, but her path is hardly set. "If you put limitations on yourself you might as well forget it. There are too many odds stacked against us in a man's world." Does she feel strongly about operating within a male power structure? "I used to have a bit of a hang up about it but not any more. Because I really like men and enjoy their company immensely, I tend to make up the rules as I go along. It's hard and frustrating but it's slowly changing.

Has she been treated differently to male actors? "I have been. I think the more you work, in a sense, the more powerful you become because the more people you attract to a programme. Therefore you're a valuable property so they're not really going to mess around with you for that period. When you're not in that position everything is stacked against you, so enjoy it while it lasts." Which reminds her: "Someone said to me recently, enjoy it while your looks last'. And I just felt - Jesus! That's what it's like. I'll get my arse done," she says scathingly, "and my tits done and my nose done when I'm 40. It's that side of it that's so alien to what I'm about and I don't suffer from that sort of insecurity."

LIKE all of us, but actors most especially, she wants to be loved. Allied with a wish to be open and straight bout things, a concern for how she will be perceived: when we meet on the set after the initial interview, she jokes about my not doing a hatchet job on her while at the end of the interview, she berates herself - without any justification whatsoever - for being inarticulate.

Her bad experiences with the press include coverage of her relationship with Stephen Tompkinson (known for his role in Drop the Dead Donkey). It is a very appealing story: two, attractive, young actors with a (very) mildly flirtatious screen relationship between priest and barmaid in a high profile TV series fall in love themselves off screen. There was huge interest in their now almost year long relationship, so Dervla and Stephen decided to oblige, invited the British press over to Tinakilly House for interviews and photographs - "we've nothing to hide, there's no big deal" - hoping for a bit of peace afterwards.

I understand that they have to have an angle to sell the story on but the intrusion sometimes gets to you. They're only waiting for us to split up . . . no, first they want us to get married and then get divorced with three kids and see who gets the car. I'm quite happy to let Bob Geldof and Paula Yates do that all on their own."

But it can get more serious, like when they were followed to a Caribbean island where they had planned "a big runaway holiday" together and ended up having to move to another island. "I suppose it's an indication of getting somewhere in life if people want to focus a telephoto lens on your bottom on holidays," she remarks sardonically. "It used to bother me but not any more. I know we're stable and comfortable and very much in love and I know that we're not selling it, that it's not a, say, business relationship. It's very real and I've no qualms about being honest and open about that and if the press want to tear us asunder in two years time, fine. It's been a difficult year but it has been a laugh too. We have a great time together, we complement each other, it's great.

It's good to be with someone who knows the stresses of the business and they don't have arguments: "We have very heated debates. It's really quite normal. We eat chocolates and pizza and watch wrestling and the Simpsons and have a good laugh." The rest of her normal life includes playing the piano (with plans to take up the flute; it's more portable), cooking and working on a coupled of projects.

Three days, however, they haven't been having much of a real life at all, because of" the constraints of Ballykissangel's shooting schedules. The series was filmed on set in a Sandyford studio, and on location in Avoca, during which time Dervla's days consisted of a 5 a.m. rise for a 5.30 a.m. pick up, an hour in make up, rehearsal, then shooting all day, till 7 p.m. or later, with an hour off to include lunch. There was just one day off each week. Not an easy regime to sustain, and she's feeling pretty exhausted. But it is also one which leads to getting to know everyone on set on a very close level. "They become your extended family - I know it's a cliche, but - working 14 hour days means you have a great support network, and to be honest I love it - acting, actors, directors, the people I work with. I love the business.