THE great Ronnie Drew of The Dubliners is having a rough and tough year. His greatly loved and gentle wife Deirdre died last June and Ronnie himself, now aged 73 years, is currently battling throat cancer. Recent TV appearances in which he was a gaunt shadow of his former flamboyantly bearded self were almost shocking. Still, the predictions are that he is recovering well, is still working away on a number of projects, and will be around to entertain us for a rousing while yet.

His birthday was just a couple of weeks ago, and if ever there was a time to remember his prime, and his contribution to the entertainment of his generation, then this is it.

Drew has always been something else. I can remember as far back as when his Dubliners actually crashed into the English pop charts with a bawdy song called "Seven Drunken Nights" at the height of the Irish ballad boom.

And many of us then were a bit critical of the paddy-whackery element of that ballad and the performances of such as Ronnie and the truly great Luke Kelly and Banjo Barney McKenna on the TV pop shows. But the fact remained that they hit the big time back then, and afterwards were never far away from it.

I recall a review of their first album appearing in Time magazine and Ronnie's voice being described there as "akin to a mating call!"

But it was, surely, one of the most distinctive voices of the last 30 or 40 years. Hear it on radio today as I did, "The September Song" from his last album (aptly entitled There's Life In The Old Dog Yet!) and the sixties in Ireland come flooding back, all those Fleadhanna and folk festivals and folk clubs.

All those big beards and guitars and the crois (woolen belts) around the waists of an entire generation. Aran sweaters and the beginnings of social and economic liberation, a nation just about beginning to march to the beat of its own heart.

And there at the heart of it was the gravelly voice of the Dun Laoghaire man with the big black beard and the surprisingly articulate guitar style.

And we were all amazed to discover that voice, with its heavy Dublin accent, had spent the best part of a decade in Spain teaching the Queen's English to young Spaniards!

And it brought the street songs of Dublin to the whole nation, like the one from Monto, the old red light district of the capital. And when you saw the Dubliners in action, rough and wild, you always thought that they were a wild, hard-drinking outfit, wild as Kelly's red head or Drew's beard, and had been lucky to turn up for the gig at all.

And that thought was maybe closer to the truth than we knew.

But once you saw them and heard them, with Skehan and Bourke and others, for sure you never forgot the Dubliners and their clear leader Ronnie Drew.

And the stories of their drinking exploits were legendary. And was that lifestyle connected to Luke Kelly's death well before his time? I don't know for sure, but you'd have your suspicions.

I interviewed them once in the fabled O'Donoghue's pub in Dublin just before they hit the top. They were a lively outfit, quick and wry to talk with, sinking their afternoon pints and shorts with relish (drinking the young reporter from the magazine under the table in jig time too!) and I hugely enjoyed myself.

They'd released a record on the Irish market just before that, and I remember their manager was the then unknown Noel Pearson. And when I asked about that release he replied, "That yoke was not released - it escaped!"

On the radio a few years ago I had another interview with a cigar-smoking Drew and the lovely Leitrim songstress Eleanor Shanley. Drew had then been working as a solo artiste away from the Dubliners for years, though his name will forever be associated with them.

The beard had silvered but he still otherwise looked and sounded the same. The pair did a duet for me live, the gravel of Drew and the youthful grace notes of Shanley singing "I've got a couple more years on you baby, that's all" in a performance I'll never forget. And the switchboard exploded.

That ballad boomtime was more than just a musical thing. It was an Irish boom time as well, a defining and brighter couple of decades from those that had gone before.

So many of the voices that capped it have been silenced now - Luke Kelly, most of the Clancy Brothers, the great Tommy Makem, many more.

Even the talented Jim McCann, who replaced Drew as the Dubliners' main vocalist, has now been silenced, at least temporarily, by a throat ailment. Frank Harte is gone too.

But the mighty Ronnie Drew, the most distinctive voice of them all and probably the most powerful presence too, he is soldiering on through what has to be the most demanding year of his life. And he defiantly releases an album called There's Life In The Old Dog Yet.

And he promises another. And says he will be back performing soon.

As they say in Dublin, he's a great bit of stuff.