As the principal author of the two television drama series that have most shaped Irish culture in the last 40 years, Wesley Burrowes has an unlikely background.
He is a Northern Protestant, born (in 1930) and reared in Bangor, Co Down, a former insurance salesman, whose father was a civil servant in the Stormont of the old days.
He was educated in the posh Protestant Belfast secondary school, Instonians and later at Queen's University where he studied French and German, graduating in 1952. Immediately on graduation he moved to Dublin to join the "very Protestant" Commercial Insurance Company.
He says he got the job because he was a Protestant and he regularly advised Catholic employees to leave, as they had no chance of promotion unless they "turned their coat".
In 1959 he got a job in Coras Trachtala, as an adviser on the furniture trade, about which he knew "not a great deal". But the job allowed him to write review material - comic sketches for the likes of Des Keogh, Dave Kelly, Cecil Sheridan and Rosaleen Linehan.
He co-wrote a musical for the 1963 Dublin Theatre Festival, Carrie, which starred Milo O'Shea and Ray McAnally. Its success encouraged him to resign from Coras Trachtala to write full time. His first introduction to RTE was an invitation to write for the series Tolka Row, and a year later The Riordans started. He has been involved in television drama with RTE since then.
The initial idea for The Riordans came from the then controller of programmes, the Scandinavian Gunner Rugheimer, and it was devised with the paternalistic objective of "helping Irish farmers understand modern agricultural methods".
"We were regarded as fairly primitive in our farming methods - hand-milking and all that kind of thing," he recalls.
It was during the second year of that series that he become involved as the principal script writer for The Riordans. His initial instinct was that the series would not last for more than three months.
He lives with his wife in a magnificent semi-detached Victorian house in Bray, beside Christ Church on Church Road. The last draft of the script of a film he is engaged in, The Medium, was on the coffee table as we did the interview.
He is currently engaged in writing several film scripts, one of which, he hopes, will involve Gabriel Byrne, with whom he worked on the television series Bracken.