He always wanted to be an actor. As a youngster he was spellbound by what he saw on the stage of the Abbey Theatre and when he left school he went singlemindedly about achieving his goal. Patrick Dawson secured a place as a student actor with the Abbey Theatre School of Acting under the direction of Tomas MacAnna and then went on to further training at RADA in London.

He began his professional career at the Abbey and has since worked with all the major Irish theatre companies and in film, radio and television. At present Dawson would be familiar to listeners to RTE's radio soap, Konvenience Korner, as the voice of Dr Dan O'Connell.

"I was very lucky to get screen-tested for a good film part early on and getting that gave my career a very important push forward," says Dawson. "It also put my income on a level which would have been higher than normal at that point."

Despite this, he has spent most of his career working freelance as a jobbing actor and writer. "I've been through the scary times when you're not sure where the next pay cheque is coming from. When I began working freelance it was a lot more unusual than it is now. Far more people today are choosing to work this way or are being forced to do so by changes in employment patterns - for example, the use of contracts by organisations instead of giving people full-time jobs.

"Working freelance is unpredictable by its nature but I've been fortunate in that I've always had a few strings to my bow so that has helped. Having been an actor for some time, I then branched out into writing and served my apprenticeship on Harbour Hotel for which I wrote several hundred episodes.

"That was a very good training ground. I've also been lucky to have had enormous variety in my acting life, from acting in Shakespeare and Shaw to working in panto with Maureen Potter. Working in panto gave me a great education in how scripts are worked on and developed."

As one of the team of writers behind Fair City, a big chunk of Dawson's life still revolves around the development of scripts. "There are two major approaches to writing soaps or serials and I've done both," he says. "One is where a single writer basically dictates what happens and has almost 100 per cent control over what goes in.

"The other is where you have a team of people and the process is more industrialised for want of a better description. Fair City is worked on a team basis where no one person sets the whole agenda and story lines essentially come from the development of the characters.

"We try to work out what would challenge a particular character and then build the story around how they cope. If that means covering an `issue' of the day then that's fine, but we don't look for ways of dragging issues in, we're not issue based."

Meetings can get very loud and very excited when a plot is developing, says Dawson. "Everyone is chipping in and things are unfolding at a very rapid pace. It's fun and creative with lots of ideas flowing. But when that's over it's down to mundane things like writing out agreed story lines and planning episodes."

HIS favourite characters in Fair City? Dawson chooses Pascal, the erudite bar man, and garage-owner Harry Molloy. "I like Pascal's quirkiness and his adherence to old world gentility and I'd choose Harry because he's a really solid father figure."

Dawson, too, is a father and he and his wife, Eleanor, have a grown-up son and daughter and a younger son of 17. "The kids are terrific," he says. "We've really enjoyed them - they're three fine young people."

He is also a member of the Baha'i faith which is one of the youngest of the world's religions. Related to Islam in much the same way as Christianity relates to Judaism, it has about six million members worldwide.

"My interest in the Baha'i faith began in the Seventies," says Dawson who was raised in the Church of Ireland. "I was always something of a searcher and, when I came across it, I was sceptical enough. But I began to read about it and I became more and more interested and eventually was convinced that for me this was where the truth lay.

"The Baha'i faith originated in Iran in the mid 1840s and, since its foundation, its followers have been persecuted by the Iranian establishment. At the moment we are very concerned by what has happened to those running the Baha'i Institute of Higher Education in Iran.

"Baha'i members are excluded from attending colleges and universities in Iran, so the community set up its own thirdlevel college which is run along the lines of the Open University with over 900 students and 150 academic staff. In September and early October the government raided the homes of faculty members, arresting staff and confiscating teaching equipment, books and records. The Irish Baha'i community is very shocked and saddened by these events which contravene the basic human right to education."

Education and self-development are very important within the Baha'i faith and, just over two years ago, Dawson embarked on an MA in mass communications by distance learning at Leicester University. He graduated last July after what he calls "a marathon struggle to get through." He admits that juggling his personal life, professional commitments and the demands of an MA course was not easy.

"The only way I got through was with great support from my family, good time planning, not taking any holidays and studying on Saturday mornings from 6 a.m. when everyone else was looking forward to their lie-in," he says.

"The Baha'is believe strongly in education and a lot of the people I know are doing some sort of training or further education as mature students. For myself, it was also partly to do with catching up with what I had missed out by not going to college when I left school."