ENTREPRENEURS HOPING FOR LUCK O' THE IRISH.

Byline: Dan Barry The New York Times

The hobnail boots are warming beside the hearth, and the tobacco pipes rest in a rack on the mantel. An old black bicycle leans against the wall near the front door. And the bartender, a large man wearing a vest and a tie, awaits your order. A pint, is it? Or maybe a shot, nice and clean?

It is as if you have been transported to a corner of rural Ireland, one frozen in the distant and sanitized past. That is the clear intent of the newly opened Thady Con's, New York City's first Irish village ``theme'' bar. Its owners hope that you suspend disbelief for an hour or two and forget that this little bit of heaven is sandwiched between two Chinese restaurants on Second Avenue near 49th Street.

Having given an entrepreneurial spin to Irish hospitality, they ask that you stay awhile - and not only after today's St. Patrick's Day Parade up Fifth Avenue.

Thady Con's is just one example of the growing demand for anything Irish, from the kitschy to the cultural. Public television stations are capitalizing on that interest during their pledge drives. The recent memoirs of Frank McCourt and James Carroll have made their mark in American letters. Hollywood continues to explore every bog in the Irish psychic landscape.

The genesis of this Irish lovefest, which has been building for several years, has not sprung from one seed, observers say. Some, like the historian Marion Casey, say that the Irish Tourist Board has refined its marketing techniques in the United States, so much so that genealogical services and bed-and-breakfast operations in Ireland have become, well, cottage industries. Others, like the author Frank McCourt, believe that the influence of the Roman Catholic Church on the Irish - which he describes as repressive - has waned, spawning a liberation of expression.

Several say that tax breaks to encourage film making in Ireland, as well as the Internet, have made the country's charms and troubles more accessible to Irish-Americans, spurring curiosity about their heritage.

But Frances Scanlon contends that it is simply time for the Irish. Seventy-five years have passed since Ireland gained its independence from England, and 150 years since ``Black '47,'' the central year of the potato famine that sent waves of Irish to the United States. Now, she said, the Irish voice is full-throated, and the market is listening.

``Seeds that are sown do mature, and so you find the flourishing bloom on the Irish at the end of this century,'' said Scanlon, a lawyer and publicity director for the Brehon Law Society, an organization for lawyers of Irish heritage. ``Now it's hip to be Irish.''

Roddy Doyle's fictional portrayals of a hardscrabble section of Dublin have prompted movies and attracted a popular following for a decade. But in the last year there has been an Irish literary explosion. First came the Irish poet Seamus Heaney, who won the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature. Then came James Carroll, an Irish-American, who recently won a National Book Award for his memoir, ``American Requiem: God, My Father and the War That Came Between Us'' (Houghton Mifflin). Now Frank McCourt, a retired New York City schoolteacher, continues to receive acclaim for ``Angela's Ashes,'' his searing account of an impoverished childhood in Limerick.

Such literary accounts of the Irish experience continue to convince film makers that audiences will pay to see movies about an Ireland free of leprechauns. Several years ago, thanks in part to encouragement from the Irish government, there began to appear films that dealt with a truer, somewhat rough-hewn Ireland, from Jim Sheridan's ``My Left Foot'' to Alan Parker's ``The Commitments,'' which was based on the novel by Roddy Doyle.

The deluge of Irish films has continued. In the last year alone, three major feature films have focused on the Irish Republican Army: ``Michael Collins,'' starring Liam Neeson; ``Some Mother's Son,'' with Helen Mirren; and ``The Devil's Own,'' a new movie starring Harrison Ford and Brad Pitt.