FEW people hate quite as viciously or as inconsistently as the Irish. It is a hatred which swings between crude pub humour and genuine hysterical invective. Only the historically based religious hatreds are as predictable as they are unending. The other hatreds, those of personalised ridicule and rancour, manifest themselves like the capricious Irish weather, all forms often in the same day, depending on the gossip - or lack of it - of the moment.

The veteran novelist Francis Stuart has often fulfilled the public role of icon of hatred; he makes his critics feel righteous. His own behaviour has not helped. Stuart's non heroic restlessness has done little to dispel the criticism. Apparently destined to live on, his long life has made him guilty of the greatest war crime of all, survival.

Consciously cultivating his outsider status, he offers neither endorsements nor denouncements, and appears to enjoy his notoriety. "It suits the kind of writer I am; I have always been an outsider and I have always been vilified. I don't write from inside my society, I write from outside it," he says.

The latest bout of abuse directed at Stuart has been occasioned by Aosdana contentiously choosing to elect Stuart to a Saoi, a decision bound to back fire on Stuart. "Of course I felt honoured, it is very pleasant to receive such an accolade, but I was put forward for election twice before and didn't have enough votes, so that rather puts it into perspective for me. But I did enjoy meeting the President. When she presented me with the torc - which is a beautiful thing - she commented on the awkwardness of my works. I liked that."

Is he wise? "I have never been wise, I was always quite stupid, never quite clued in to anything. I think I became mature about the age of 91. Even as a young person, I drifted. I was anti Treaty during the Civil War. I don't now know why."

Did he ever kill anyone? "I don't know. I carried a machine gun. As you know they fire a spray of bullets - in a close skirmish, who is to know where the bullets go?"

Many words are currently being expended on debating the interpretation or, perhaps, re invention of Michael Collins as leader and as man. Did Stuart meet him? "I shook hands with him, if that means anything." Stuart does not recall being particularly struck by Collins nor noticing the alleged personal aura of the guerrilla leader turned statesman. "He was not particularly handsome either, although it appears he has now become so. I was a prisoner in Portlaoise when we heard he had been killed. We were playing cards and I remember a big cheer going up. I didn't cheer, I just watched and listened."

Of his Civil War experiences Stuart says: "They were the worst of my life, the most vicious. Nothing is worse than civil war." It toughened him, "but I think going to an English prep school helped make me tough as well. Those schoolboys really were the most unpleasant characters. I remember them lining up to see a sheep being slaughtered. Looking back on the Civil War though I was not really committed, I drifted into it.

It is a strange story, all of it. Francis Stuart is 94, nearly as old as the century, an ancient, almost surreal, figure. Frail but tough and alert. He says his memory is bad, but it remains vivid and usually accurate. His books are curious, flawed, egocentric, engaged with his account of his own history. Black List, Section H (1971), his best book, has been acclaimed as a masterpiece by some, others have dismissed it as an exercise in self justification. Although The Pillar of Cloud (1948) set in the moral ruins "the vast graveyard" of post war Germany reads as an attempt to explain the situation, he thinks the book is flawed. "I wrote it too soon. I should have allowed more time to pass." He prefers his Irish novel, Redemption (1949). Nor does he offer himself as a witness. "Even my best books are flawed, I'm not a perfectionist. I wrote too many books too quickly, some of them are lousy. But what was my intention as a writer? I suppose it is twofold: to expose the amount of hypocrisy I saw around me and to replace it with my vision, a vision born of my faith in Christianity." They appear deliberately non art, sometimes it is as if he is writing in a second language. Stuart's strained formal prose has often had the quality of translation.

Caught in a twilight zone of German high romanticism and philosophy, he could be seen as a minor European absurdist. His vision appears to be a benignly anarchic one. Stuart has always offered impressions, not absolutes. The artist as outsider and as drifter is his central theme as a writer and it appears to have become the code he has lived by. At no time has he struck one as a political thinker in any form. No one would agree more than Francis Stuart himself that he is politically irrelevant - and always was. As with H, he is a drifter, a dreamer, never a hypocrite. He seems at once amused at life and beyond all caring at what others have said and written about him.

"Churchill and Hitler both had their demons, but while Churchill would have claimed his demons were good - Hitler would have said he didn't know. In times of war, no one has clean hands. War is monstrous. Innocents, don't fight wars, they only suffer the results of them."

As he opens the door of the small, anonymous bungalow in south Dublin where he lives with his cat, he glances outside at the leaves on the driveway and says, "it's colder than I thought it was". Walking carefully, the cat at his heels, he leads the way to the sitting room where a gas fire has been burning for several hours. The room is spartan and tidy as is the entire house. Order has always been important to him. At once drab yet comfortable, the brightest room is the one he calls the library - a parlour like room facing on to the road where he keeps most of his books, including a copy of the first English translation of Beckett's Trilogy, inscribed "To Francis. From Sam - Paris 1984".

Stuart's resigned expression says more than words. Yet again he is about to be asked about his years in wartime Berlin Has he ever felt hurt about the criticisms directed at him?

"No because it is to be expected. People are entitled to say what they want because of my position during the last war. I broadcast from Germany. The fact that none of these people who have condemned me for broadcasting has ever heard what I was actually saying, does not seem to matter. I was there, that is enough."

The tone is matter of fact, logical. And logic quickly establishes itself as Stuart's main ally in a conversation in which he again re visits his strange past. "I have always believed in fate, in destiny. I don't like the way people make excuses for their actions, trying to wriggle out of something they did. Empty apologies mean nothing. And who am I to ask forgiveness of? I was in Germany, in Berlin, It was exciting, it was terrifying. It was at the heart of history. Now we know what it all meant. At the time we didn't." Was he drawn to fascism as were Yeats, Eliot and Pound? "Not at all. How could anyone be drawn to fascism? It is too one track. There is no room for the imagination in it."

While working in Berlin University, did he notice that Jewish academics were either leaving or disappearing? "You saw things. I remember one Jewish professor saying to me: `You're ruining your reputation as a writer in the English speaking world.' I knew what he was saying. But I was there, fate had decided it and I wanted to be there." Among the many charges laid at Stuart is one of anti Semitism. "I have spoken and written several million words in my life. I one could ever point to a sentence of mine that was or is anti Semitic," he says.

AS in his fiction, Stuart in conversation often uses religious imagery. "I've always been a believer, not a sceptic." His new book, a comic satiric novella, King David Dances is, as he says himself, many things aside from "an indirect attack on society and a putting forward of my own faith and vision". Not even his most vicious judges could accuse him of being a materialist. Pointing to the jacket and the comic picture in which the said king is doing a little dance, he says, "I particularly like the broken television".

The little book seems to contain many side swipes at his critics. Stuart smiles at the observation. In one dialogue he meets an old friend and reports: "His story was gradually revealed. Ah, how pitiable are these personal stories that are either our hidden, and sometimes only, personal treasure, or else torments . . . yes bereft of our stories what would we be, nobodies, nothing." The narrator notes of his unhappy visitor: "He was accused in his native land of being a war criminal". Is this Stuart the man rather than novelist speaking? He laughs: "Well there are some personal comments, my work has always been my story." Elsewhere in the same book, a mock inquisition takes place. The narrator is asked: "No doubts?" to which he replies, "nothing but doubts".

The prevailing tone of Black List, Section H is one of cultivated gormlessness; the narrator H emerges on one level as a dreamer in search of Dostoyevskian urgency and on another level, is a half hearted obsessive, wary of responsibility in any guise and certainly on the run from a failing marriage. Stuart the man is more stoical and rejects any convenient explanations.

"I went to Germany for work and stayed there because I had a job and also of course because my marriage had gone wrong. But there is more to it. There always is." His ability to absorb insults is unsettling. Was he ever particularly argumentative? "Most of my great rows were with women," he says. He married his third wife, artist Finola Graham, in 1987.

Of the many myths, inaccuracies and accusations which surround his past, he singles out two. I have tended not to pay too much attention to the things written about me in newspapers, but I was annoyed when I discovered that a journalist had decided I wrote the broadcasts for William Joyce, I did not, I was almost going to sue over it but then I asked myself, `why bother?' As for the infamous broadcasts Stuart says: "I was sickened by righteous rhetoric of the Allies promoting their Christian ethics. Remember Ireland was neutral and whatever information there seemed to be came from England and then the Americans as they entered the war. I never spoke about the military situation in Germany. But I did want to give another aspect."

According to Stuart there are about 100 or maybe 50 of the recordings I made up in the military intelligence place in the Phoenix Park. They are difficult to make out. I spoke down a funnel kind of thing to block out the sound of the air raids, so they are very muffled."

One Irish person who remembers hearing Stuart's broadcasts is the writer and historian Liam de Paor. "I was a schoolboy and all schoolboys are fascinated by war. These broadcasts were relayed from Berlin via Paris Radio. I think they went out on Saturday nights. I can remembering hearing Stuart urging the Irish people to vote for Fianna Fail." Stuart says he does not recall advising the Irish people about voting "but I do remember praising de Valera and also neutrality".

While seemingly content to remain in his outsider role, he has become anxious to correct the view that his marriage to Iseult Gonne was a complete disaster - "people to consider it so", an impression admittedly not helped by the way His marriage is portrayed in Black List, Section H. And also there is the fact that Stuart did not return to Ireland until after her death in 1954.

"There is always the impression that I married this older woman and it was awful.

That marriage lasted one way or the other for 20 years. In all my long, long life I have loved two women, Iseult and Madeleine." His second wife, Madeleine died in 1986.

"Poor Iseult, between myself and her mother, she had a hard time." Iseult was six years older than Stuart. They married in 1920 when he was 18. Iseult by that time had already rejected Yeats, was well used to moving in sophisticated social and artistic circles and had a brief relationship with Ezra Pound.

"What she ever saw in me remains a mystery," he says. "When I first saw her at George Russell's house, I thought she was Maud Gonne." He then points out: "Iseult's beauty was far softer than her mother's. By the time I met Mrs MacBride she was quite haggard. Maud Gonne had the type of beauty that either becomes bloated or very haggard."

Some years before that first meeting, when Stuart was four months old, his father had committed suicide in a Sydney mental asylum. "He and his brothers had all gone out to Australia to make their fortunes - which they did through sheep farming. My father made no fortune." There is a photograph of Stuart's father, Henry Stuart, in the annex off the sitting room. He looks an austere man, handsome and stiffly formal, a Victorian.

"He was 50 when I was born, that's the only photograph I have ever seen of him. I never met him, but one of the uncles was his twin. And the uncles, they were very good to me." The Stuart family, however, never forgave Stuart's mother and blamed her for Henry's death. The infant Stuart was raised in Antrim, largely in the care of a nurse. "My mother had her own life, I never thought there was anything wrong in that. But no I can't say I was close to her."

THE young man who decided against all the odds he wanted to be a writer shared most of H's problems. Stuart was never academically talented. H is in fact dismissed by his teachers and others as illiterate, "as I more or less was myself", he says.

"I don't think writing is all that important. I've lived and I think living is more important and our society tends to put culture before living, before life, I think that is a big mistake. Even Yeats knew that by the end, and wrote that line, about putting old words away and beginning to live." ["I might have thrown poor words away. And been content to live." (Words, The Green Helmet, 1910) H, the Stuart alter ego in Black List, decides somewhat melodramatically "literature was only to be experienced by those who pluck it direct from the tree of life". Stuart's own life has certainly provided him with the material for his books.

It is impossible not to comment on his lack of bitterness. Is he happy? "Happy is a word I've never used but I do think I've reached the stage of being tranquil and content and that is what I wanted."

How does he want to be remembered? The question amuses him greatly, but his reply is delivered with equal measures of irony and serious intent, the inevitable Stuart ambiguity, "as a great prophet". No absolutes, as Lodsi answers his inquisitor, "nothing, but doubts".