THE current cohort of twenty-something Irish composers is a lively, successful bunch. All born in the 1970s, they are children of the Information Age, the Internet and the Compact Disc. Their latter school years and third-level careers coincided with the emergence of the Celtic Tiger, Ireland's economic miracle. Driven, determined, and busy, they are also generously candid about their lives, music and opinions. These latter swing between wide divergence and close consensus. But nearly all the composers agree that it's a good time for composition in Ireland.

'It's very exciting at the moment', says Judith Ring (b. 1977). 'A lot going on in a lot of different styles. It seems like you can do whatever you want at the moment, and people are quite accepting and interested.' Ring's own field is electro-acoustic music, in which she won last year's international Luigi Russolo Competition for her piece, Accumulation, featuring domestic appliances recorded and electronically transformed beyond recognition into sounds of almost cosmic grandeur. 'My source material is basically anything I can make noise out of and record and then manipulate on the computer. The only equipment I work with is the computer, so I've had to find a style of creating music in that way.' Ring, having completed a Masters in Music Technology at Trinity College, Dublin, would like to do nothing but write music. But she knows she needs a job, especially if she is to get away to Holland and immerse herself in composition.

Ed Bennett (b. 1975) has been away - five years studying in England - and is back in Ireland only six months. He shares Ring's appreciation for the current climate of acceptance in Irish new music. 'It's more open here than in England, more diverse. There is a sort of stigma in England about mixing complex music with, perhaps, simple music. It has to be one or the other, and so you are very pigeon-holed.' And Bennett, whose eclectic tastes and influences embrace a wide range from Ligeti to Frank Zappa, jazz to pop, is not easily pigeonholed. This month he takes some time off from his part-time teaching at Bangor College in Northern Ireland in order to attend Louis Andriessen's International Young Composers' Meeting in Apeldoorn. Bennett is one of only fifteen chosen from around Europe.

A previous participant of the Apeldoorn course agrees about pigeonholing. Rob Canning (b. 1974), 1998's RTE Composer of the Future and the winner of the 1999 New Music for Sligo Competition, recalls a remark by Jane O'Leary. 'She said that because the music scene in Ireland was relatively small, there was no space for the compartmentalisation of the audience, so preventing composers from getting sucked into very narrow stylistic ways. It's one of the benefits of working in Ireland.'

If the present is good, the future looks even better, according to Jürgen Simpson (b. 1975). 'I think the next four years are looking very interesting', says Simpson, currently a lecturer in electronic composition at Trinity College Dublin. 'There's a huge amount happening. On the one hand, the immediacy of electronics coming into many people's homes, via the computer, has opened up the whole idea of composition. Especially experimental composition, especially young people. I know of a lot of twelve- to sixteen-year-olds who are doing very, very sophisticated work on their home computers.

'There's a lot of very diverse work happening in Dublin itself. So I think it's thriving and that the economic boom has helped as well. There's a better attitude: Project (the Project Arts Centre in Dublin's Temple Bar), the Crash Ensemble and things like that have certainly boosted people's ideas about Irish new music.'

Recently appointed to a three-year composer residency with the Northern Youth Orchestra in Durham, Fennessy can't quite identify the special buzz amongst Ireland's new generation of young composers. He senses it in the success of the Crash Ensemble and in music's decentralisation away from the National Concert Hall in Dublin's Earlsfort Terrace. 'I don't know what it is. Maybe it's outside influences brought in by composers returning from abroad. It's a wavelength, not a stylistic thing. Just a way of thinking. It's not even a spirit of experimentation, but of confidence.'

The composer to whom he relates this Irish wavelength and confidence is Gerald Barry. 'I think he must have been a huge influence on Irish composers of my generation. He was on me anyway. I haven't even known his music that long. I haven't been composing that long. But again it seems more like a confidence thing than something stylistic. He just has what it takes to do what he wants.'

All the twenty-somethings I spoke to number various Irish figures amongst the composers they consider important to them. But Barry's is the name that crops up with the greatest frequency. Ed Bennett, for example, declares himself 'a big fan'. Andrew Hamilton (b. 1977), current holder of the Arts Council's Elizabeth Maconchy Composition Fellowship and studying for a DPhil at York University, says, 'it's always been Gerald Barry who has been the composer to look up to'. Jürgen Simpson is another who agrees.

But if Barry's influence and importance are so generally acknowledged, can we not start thinking in terms of an Irish 'school' of composition? Once more there is an overall consensus among the answers.

'It's dangerous to talk in terms of "schools",' says Fennessy. 'People think "schools" are a stylistic thing. And I would say that it's the diversity of styles that makes the Irish new music scene exciting.'

'It might be nice to have a "school",' suggests Ed Bennett in the same spirit, 'but only if it was known for its openness and diversity.'

'We can talk about "an Irish school" in terms of a school of thought', says Simpson. 'I think that might be happening or growing. But I'm not sure about Irish sound yet.'

Andrew Hamilton is more definite. He can't envisage an Irish school because other Irish composers his own age are so different from him and from each other.

The suggestion of a school is perhaps slightly mischievous, and it eventually provokes a mischievous response. Ailís Ní Riain (b. 1974) is studying for an MPhil in Manchester where she also works full-time in a bank. 'I think if you want to have a school you can have one,' says Ní Riain, RTE's current Composer of the Future, who is also participating in the Young Composers' Meeting in Apeldoorn this month. 'And it's easy to go through all our pieces, come up with something that will link us, and call it an Irish school. If having an Irish school would promote the cause, have an Irish school! That's all I can say. And tell me what the tips are so that I can start writing that way!'

So if this new generation of Irish composers is not destined to produce a school, is there anything which unifies them? They are all Irish, of course. But is their music?

'That's a very large can of worms', says Ailís Ní Riain, 'but I'll restrain myself. My music is Irish music because it's written by an Irish person, first and foremost. Secondly, I would say there are definitely elements of what I consider to be a type of Irishness about some of the music. Some would say, "Actually, it's a lot more blatant than you're letting on".'

David Fennessy can't be sure to what extent his own music is tuned to the 'Irish wavelength' that he has described. 'I would never even try to second-guess it like that. It always strikes me as something for other people to find out. Yes, I'm an Irishman living abroad, with whatever effect that has. The dots get put on the pages.

'But the whole question of national identity came up for me recently. I was applying for a commission to an English trust that shall remain nameless. Because I wasn't British, I couldn't apply for it. But they suggested that I change my passport. To which I had a surprisingly spirited response. I mean that it surprised me. It threw up a lot of questions, about what exactly it is that makes you Irish. Whether it's that little book with the harp on the front. Or something different.'

There is a general agreement that the composers themselves might not be in the best position to assess their music's Irishness. Andrew Hamilton doesn't think that his music is Irish. 'But then again, some people have said it to me. (English composer) Simon Halsey once said to me, "only an Irish composer could have composed that", but I didn't know what he meant.'

'Because tradition has caused so much trouble in this country, I don't really want to have anything to do with it.'

Ed Bennett is cautious. 'Because tradition has caused so much trouble in this country, I don't really want to have anything to do with it. And that has affected my music, because tradition is always used as an excuse for wrongdoing. I feel that that has affected me greatly. I don't really like delving into the past if possible.

'As for my own musical fingerprints, I think there's definitely something there. I mean, I don't pick Celtic melodies - that wouldn't be me. But there's certainly a feel. I grew up here and it has affected me a lot. But I just couldn't think of any one technical thing. Something more philosophical, perhaps spiritual.'

Ailís Ní Riain's Irishness is sometimes more self-conscious. 'At times I have dropped in some Irish influences. Especially when I use text. I only set Irish writers. I set a very long poem by Christy Brown. Also Brendan Kennelly, which was the text I used for The Man Made of Rain. I understand those texts very well. They speak to that lonely part of one's self. And they happen to be Irish writers.'