Having truly seized the day with his second, breakthrough album, Damien Dempsey continues to break the wispy singer-songwriter mould by singing and writing about subjects with social resonance. Jim Carroll talks to the modest ex-pugilist about the rocky road to success

IT MAY be 10 years since he last went toe-to-toe in a serious bout in the ring, but Damien Dempsey still has that boxer's gait. You can see it in his shoulders and in the quiet confidence as he walks into the room. Dempsey is still a boxing enthusiast, still watches the boxing when he gets a chance. Every so often he goes down to the local club in Donaghmede and gets in the ring with the younger fellas. "I do some sparring and get the head boxed off me."

He likes to spoof the Yanks that the mighty Jack Dempsey was his granddaddy. Some of them, he thinks, are taken in by the yarn.

"Evander Holyfield, he was the best of the lot," he reckons. Holyfield came a cropper when he climbed back into the ring last year with Michael McDonald, but that doesn't lessen Dempsey's regard for him. "He was the smallest, he wasn't really a heavyweight. A very stylish boxer, a real tactician. He'd take a beating, he'd get himself off the floor and he'd come right back. He fought them all and he stood up to every one of them."

You could say that there's a little bit of Holyfield in Damien Dempsey. He's still taking them all on. The difference is he's still winning. A third album, Shots, is due out in March and, like Dempsey's first two, it's an album you won't meet every day. His second album, Seize the Day, sold more than 25,000 copies in Ireland and found an audience for itself throughout the UK, US and Europe. The new one, then, is no shot in the dark.

Dempsey may be an Irish singer-songwriter, but he observes and comments on contemporary issues his peers never choose to see or acknowledge. His songs are about life rather than lifestyle, fiery urban folk music for and about folk who never make the headlines.

Last October, Dempsey walked out on the stage of Radio City Music Hall in New York. Just him and his songs. Six thousand people sitting down in front of him waiting for Morrissey. The ghosts of Nina Simone and Billie Holiday and Frank Sinatra shuffling around backstage.

"I had a few sleepless nights before that one, alright. But I walked out on my own with a guitar and slayed them." He likes those big old halls where there's history in the stalls. "Big stages suit my voice. I can really throw my voice out there and hold notes for 30 or 40 seconds. If I can do that on my own, I can do anything."

Ten years ago, Damien Dempsey at Radio City Music Hall was a fanciful notion. That summer in Dublin saw him miming to tunes from his EP, The Contender, at a Beat in the Street in Tallaght. He went on after a boy-band called First Kiss and before another one called Summer Love. Dempsey shakes his head now with disbelief. "I was the meat in a boy-band sandwich. I had to mime and I swore I'd never do it again."

He did a few more Beats that summer, but he sure as hell didn't mime. He sang his own songs, the ones he started writing back when he was 15. "My first song was about the smog over Dublin in the 1980s," he says, smiling at the memory. "Yeah, I suppose I was always socially conscious. My first song was not a love song, it was about smog."

By 1997, after an apprenticeship spent in the Ballyfermot Rock School and at singer-songwriter nights in the International Bar, Dempsey was on the radio with a tune called Dublin Town. It was the most played song on the radio for a few weeks, a Top 20 hit to boot, but it didn't feel right to Dempsey. Didn't suit him. "The producers I was working with wanted to make it radio-friendly. But they took a lot of meaning out of the song.

"I don't think it did me any favours. It got me name out there, but I didn't know what to do or say back then, I was doing what I was told."

Three years later, Dempsey's début album arrived in the shops. The singer expected They Don't Teach This Shit in School to do great things, but the small label which released the album had no money to promote it.

"It was desperate," he remembers. "I'd go to do a gig in the Da Club or Eamon Doran's and no one would turn up. I was going nowhere, walking around with a fiver in my back pocket. I was living off the generosity of others, but people do get sick of you."

Worse, the city was full of miming muppets going around doing their synchronised dancing and having No 1 after No 1. "I couldn't help thinking what was I doing wrong. There I was, 200 songs written and I couldn't get anything. It was a tough old time. People around me were saying: 'Why don't you get a real job, you louser? It's not going to happen, just accept it'."

He didn't accept it, but he did go looking for a job. Ended up giving songwriting workshops on a Community Employment scheme in Finglas. Travellers from Dunsink, kids in Trinity House, troublesome youngsters at large in schools around Finglas and Blanchardstown: Dempsey was finding out why they didn't teach this shit in school.

"Some of those workshops were fairly hairy, but it was good for me. I'd go in, play a few songs. One of them, Bad Time Garda, was a good icebreaker. I'd tell them to write about anything. Joyriding, drugs, fighting, women, say whatever you want. They'd be lashing out really good lyrics and melodies. I couldn't believe the talent because they'd never written before. I'd like to think that some of them kept it up."

He himself never thought of giving up. Not for a second. Encouragement from Shane McGowan and Christy Moore helped. "When a hero validates your work, that gives you the strength to keep going. A few people whose opinion I respected told me to keep going, that I had something that was original and different."

He reckons he's probably heard all the slagging there is to hear about him, his songs and his voice. "I had to go through a lot of shite and slagging to get here. People saying 'how can he sing like that? He's awful, he's brutal'. I had to stick to my guns."

Now, thanks to the success of Seize the Day, Dempsey faces a different class of smart remarks. "People around home think I'm rolling in it, they think I'm making a mint," he says with a big grin on his face. "People see the platinum album and try to work out the sums and think I'm loaded. But I'm not. If I was making money, I wouldn't still be living at home. Anything I make from gigs goes straight back into releasing my stuff in England."

That kind of high profile, Dempsey says, means he has become a target for bandwagons. There was a Socialist Youth festival he was supposed to be doing in Monaghan. When he heard his name was on the posters, it was news to him. No one had bothered to ask.

"I've become very wary. I don't want to be aligned with any particular group, I just want to express myself the best way I can. I'm very wary of charity gigs because sometimes the person putting them on is only doing so to advance their own career. I do my own bit of charity work, but I don't want to jump on any bandwagons, I want to be my own boy."

One benefit gig Dempsey did play was for Sinn Féin's Donaghmede councillor, Killian Forde, before last year's local elections. "I've a lot of friends who are in Sinn Féin and I see the work they do around my neighbourhood. It's an area that needs work and they're the only ones who are doing it. That's the reason why I did the gig."

He's puzzled as to why he's the only one of the new singer-songwriters writing about what's happening in Ireland today. "It's a bit worrying that there's no one else doing what I do. I suppose my lyrics have something more substantial to say than 'I love you, you broke my heart'.

"But it's strange that there is such a lack of songwriters my age doing what I do, highlighting serious issues and talking out about them. All my heroes have spoken out about what was going on, so maybe that's why I do that myself. Maybe I should do more of it."

He wouldn't have to look too far. Around him in Donaghmede, there's plenty of people who couldn't cash in on the boom. Now they face other problems. Cocaine, Dempsey says, is rampant there. "You see people spending all their wages on it at the weekend. You go to the pub and see the old lads chomping away, all on the charlie, the hoo-hah they call it."

It's not for him, just as he said no when someone offered him some smack as a present for his 21st birthday. "A couple of friends got badly messed up on that stuff", so he looks with disgust at how someone like Pete Doherty is put up on a pedestal.

Instead, he'll keep on the straight and narrow by sticking to the boxing and swimming in the sea off Howth alongside the seals. He pulls a book of Patrick Kavanagh poems from his bag and says he's working his way through it. "I'm reading a lot because there's a big space in me head that needs to be filled with knowledge."

A few nights ago, Dempsey thought about hitting 30 this year. It doesn't phase him because he realises he's always had an old head on young shoulders.

"I love getting older. You get comfortable in your own skin, you get wiser, your confidence increases. My best is still to come. My thirties, I'll be at my best then. But when I'll be 39, I'll probably say that about my forties."

But there's a while to go before then. Right now, it's the new album which is set to win over more people in Ireland, Europe, America and Australia. As one of his early songs put it, it's all good. After all, the dream remains in place.

Dempsey looks out the window again. "My dream is The Point. Pick up the ma in a limo and drive her down. All my family and friends around me backstage. Fill the place. Have the crowd singing their heads off. Blow the roof off the place. That's my goal, I want to do that."

Shots is released on March 11th