Apart from the odd low-profile gig, we've seen little of Dolores Keane in recent times; but although she has scaled down her activities, she has been far from idle. On the gigging side, she has left out the punishing road tours for one-off festival appearances abroad - which means that she has spent a lot more time recently at home in Caherlistrane with her two kids, Joseph (10) and Tara, who'll be three this Sunday. "I spend as much time with them as I can afford, let's put it like that. When I'm with them, I'm with them 100 per cent, because before you know it, they're grown up and gone."

Certainly any rumours of her fading entirely are greatly exaggerated. She was looking feisty and fit in the Berkeley Court hotel last week, dressed in jeans and woolly jumper; the old forest of hair flaring out behind the puckish face and the ebulliant declarations in the broad East Galway accent. In Dublin for the day to clump together a few appointments with her manager, Ciaran Kavanagh, and the crew of Dara records, she was back in the centre of things; with Joseph, perched up on the seat beside her, displaying the quiet patience of Job.

For the moment, the occasion of her return is hardly the most auspicious in an artist's career - a "best of" album, to be released next week. All the big achers are on it: The Island, Caledonia, Lion In A Cage, alongside lesser-known gems like the goose-bumpy hymnal Let It Be with yesteryear's De Danann. The single (Telling Me Lies) and the duet with Emmylou Harris, Never Be the Sun, are already getting airplay, but if you want to check out the voice nowadays, there are two new songs: the Amazing Grace-like strains of John Faulkner's A

Place In Your Heart; and a duet with the chalky falsetto of Liam Bradley

(drummer and backing vocalist on the Woman's Heart Tour) on the Van Morrison marshmallow, Have I Told You Lately?

Meanwhile her recording has been gathering pace again, thanks to a new association with a Norwegian company. A few months ago she was in a castle on the northern tip of Scotland, recording a blend of Irish and Norwegian folk songs with the popular Norwegian singer Rita Eriksen. "John (Faulkner) wrote one and Rita sings a few lines in Norwegian, and I sing them in English - but the songs I sing are all Irish. Norwegian is very difficult if you haven't been aware of the language, so I decided to leave it alone and not embarass myself."

Banked up ahead of that again is a new solo album, her first since Solid

Ground over four years ago - "too long really, which is why I'm nervous about it". Recorded in two weeks in Limerick, mixed in Norway, and due for Irish release for Christmas, it sees her return to her folk/trad roots. "There are some new songs - a good few written by John (Faulkner) - but they're all in the folk/traditional vein." All of which follows on a rough period in her life - the fall-out from some unfortunate business deals and, more personally, the split-up of her long-time marriage to John Faulkner, and the birth of her daughter to her new partner. But, musically as much as personally, she and Faulkner share a deep symbiotic connection, and he is still the mainstay of the band. "We do most of it at my house: get the lads down into the living room, decide the shortlist of the songs, and then put them through the guitar test, just vocals and guitar.

It's relaxed. You can make a cup of tea or a sandwich, or put down a pot of soup and still be arguing about one thing or another."

She remains attached to the relatively remote Caherlistrane, where she chills out more at gardening than with any of the local music sessions. "Tara's a handful, as you can well imagine. I talk to her like a grown-up, because she doesn't behave babyish, but it's just . . . she's got an old head on her. She wants to do everything herself and know everything - now."

When she goes off to work she leaves the children with her sister Christine, who lives nearby. "I think the kids understand. Sure, only last week, I heard this whispering going on, and the runner was sent - Tara - to ask `when is

Mammy going singing again?' - and I says, `oh, not for a while again'.

`Oooohhh,', goes the two of them, in unison, like. You see, they always get surprises when I come back. As far as I can see, I'm not doing enough work for them."

According to herself she is singing better than she has for years, although last year she developed problems with nodes (swellings in the larynx) which led her to a voice-trainer. "A friend in Galway put me on to him - he works in

Blackrock Clinic as an ear, nose and throat man. And we had a grand chat, and he had a diagram of the throat and showed me the way you're supposed to stand when you sing, getting your ribcage in the right position and all that. "Then he says, `you should do at least two hours of singing exercises before you get up on stage'. I thought, you must be joking, I'd be too knackered to do the gig. But when he told me he had Twink running around the block, I said, `that's it', and I never went back."

Did he recommend you give up the smokes, I hazard, noting the Silk Cuts that creep out of the bag every so often? "Oh, you know well he did - but have I

listened? My aunt Sarah smokes 20 untipped Sweet Afton a day, and she's in her seventies. The way she'd sing a ballad, I'd take three breaths where she'd only take one. And Rita is the same way."

She chuckles. "I had Rita and Sarah and the mother over with me in Boston -

Rita and Sarah did the festival with me. They'd never been to America in their lives, and 'twas the first time my mother got a passport. But their one fear was that everyone was so totally against cigarettes in America, they wouldn't be able to smoke anywhere. They thought they'd be coming back in boxes . . . "

Did she ever try to give them up? "Naw. I gave up the drink for four months from New Years' Eve - I'd a $100 bet with a guy in Tuam - but never the cigarettes. I don't know. If I'm told I can't smoke, say on a non-smoking carriage on the train, I don't miss it one bit. Maybe if I were to put up a few stickers up around the house at home, sneak a few to the kids, like . . . "

Thankfully, the nodes have now largely disappeared. "I think it's down to rest. You get very tired physically, just using the top half of your body, standing in the one place in front of the mike. It gets very draining over a longish gig - and then if you're on tour, you might have a flight at 7 o'clock the next morning."

But this is a regime she's gearing back into, now that she's pulling together a short tour of America, Japan, Australia and China. "It's hard going back, all right, but I do enjoy it. It was getting to be a bit of a chore around the time

Tara was born. There was a lot of stuff going on in my life. I wasn't singing as well, but who would be? When your marriage is split up - we were together since

1978, and that's not today nor yesterday - your confidence is very much eroded.

So I just took a break from a lot of the business for a while. It wasn't a conscious decision, just the way that things worked out. But that's all behind me now."

Certainly, from the evidence of interest in the single, she is far from forgotten. She tells a hilarious anecdote of a holiday a couple of weeks ago in

Achill where, recognised in a pub, she was subjected to an hour-long autograph session for an entire busload of women from Dingle down to visit the local House of Prayer. I somehow reckon the Dinglewomen won't be the only ones delighted to see her back.