When I told people I was spending my bank holiday weekend in Ireland with the chef Richard Corrigan, owner of the Michelin-starred Lindsay House in Soho, they said things like: 'Oh, you lucky thing', and 'How relaxing!', and 'You are just so spoilt'. Which only goes to show how little people know. In one way, of course, it is an incredible treat to be on my way to Cork, Ireland's foodiest county, with only a charming and accomplished cook for company; as my aeroplane scoots down the runway, I'm already hard at work, imagining all the smoked salmon and sourdough bread I will be eating over the next three days, all the fresh seafood and delightful variety of potatoes. Then again, none of my friends actually know Corrigan. If they did, they might not have been quite so, well, blasé. During the planning of this trip, I arranged to meet him for coffee. The 20 minutes we spent together were as exhausting as anything I have ever done. Afterwards, I stumbled through Soho, weak of limb and staring of eye, like an extra in some apocalyptic disaster movie.

Corrigan is a force of nature, as unstoppable, mid-sentence, as a huge landslide, or a river that has just burst its banks. I do not think I have ever met someone who talks so fast, or so furiously. He has a County Meath accent, which is thick but not that thick, and yet there are periods when, so far as I am concerned, he might as well be talking in Urdu. Punctuation - you know, a pause here and there - is not something he bothers with overmuch. In place of a full stop, he prefers to say 'You know what I mean?' at least twice, occasionally three times. And then, just to make things even worse, there is his fondness for 'the craic', for staying up late, for carousing, even after a long night at the pass. In order to offset the effects of burning the candle at both ends, Corrigan is a massive consumer of coffee, which he hurls to the back of his throat in the manner of a seal dispensing with a small herring. The caffeine, then, keeps the chat at fever pitch even when he is on his knees with exhaustion. You watch him, and you find yourself picturing the latest shot whizzing round his body, like a silver ball in a bagatelle.

Still, never mind. I am fully prepared. In my overnight bag is an eye mask, that I might sleep like the dead whatever hour we hit the sack, and a bottle of Nurofen. What can possibly go wrong? Actually, plenty. The first thing that happens is that my plane cannot fly into Cork; the weather is too bad. When it does land, I ring Richard to arrange our rendezvous at Midleton Market. He says the rain has driven stall-holders to pack up early; our rendezvous is defunct. Instead, we arrange to meet at a restaurant called the Farmgate. As it turns out, this is a great start. For one thing, we get to eat the most delicious lunch (hake with mussels and rosemary potatoes). For another, it reminds me of why Corrigan is so beloved of foodies, of the reason why he is now a presenter of BBC2's Full on Food, in spite of his tendency to garble. Unlike lots of the chefs I have interviewed, Corrigan really likes to eat. I mean really. 'Bee-oo-tee-fool!' he chunters, popping another crisp, golden shard of Maris Piper into his mouth. 'Bee-oo-tee-fool! Can you believe this place? Can you believe this place?'

Corrigan adores food like this, and he considers Ireland a larder like no other. He grew up on his parents' farm in County Meath, which had been in the family since 1827 (they sold up in 1976, unable to make it pay). 'Everyone thinks of luscious pastures when they think of Meath, but South Meath is wetland and bog. We were four boys and three girls. I'm third from the top.' It was the farm, more than anything else, that led him to consider cooking as a career. 'I remember my mother's hands baking the bread, and that must have had an effect on me. And we killed our pigs, and they were salted and cured, so we always had bacon, belly, gammon twice a week. You'd send the beef away, but the butcher would send you back brisket. And we were legendary poachers. Legendary. A piece of wild salmon, or brown trout. We'd go out on Sunday morning with my dad when everyone else was away at mass.'

He left school at 14, a decision he still regrets. For a while, he worked on the farm of a neighbour. Then, keen to make a 'quick buck', he got a job at a local hotel; the chef was a friend of his father. He took to the work fast. 'You get up at six on a farm, and you're still welding gates at 11 at night, so you're used to hard work. I started with lowly tasks: mop, mop, wash, wash, peel, peel. Then they got me into making Christmas puddings.' But he'd heard romantic stories about young Irishmen leaving the country; he wanted to join them. A friend of a friend organised a job in Amsterdam, at a five-star hotel. Then, when its sous chef went to Rotterdam, Corrigan followed. 'After two weeks in any kitchen, I could outshine anyone else,' he says, simply. At the age of 21, he headed for London. Was this because he thought it the place to hone his talents? He snorts. 'I'd met my wife by then [Maria, the mother of his three children]. I would never have come if it hadn't been for her. Jesus, it was a shock. The first time I walked up Camden Road, suitcase in hand, I thought: this is so Dickensian. When I walked into my flat, I thought: how come there's no f***ing revolution in this country?' His new home was a room in an old house: terrible landlord, electricity meter in one corner. 'I thought: this is not life.' But he got on with it, decorating the place himself, and all the while clambering slowly towards running his own kitchen. First, chef de partie in the Sheraton Park Hotel; then sous chef at the Meridian. The defining moment of his career, however, came when he met the chef/proprietor, Stephen Bull, who offered Corrigan a job at his London restaurant. 'He was the most disorganised f***ing Welshman I've ever met in my life,' he says, with evident fondness. 'Open a can of flageolet beans,' he'd say. But I liked his attitude. When he interviewed me, I thought: how the f*** did he get a Michelin star? He was carrying trays up and downstairs. He'd been to Cambridge, he was a bit of scholar. But he didn't have a [culinary] repertoire as such. He'd put couscous with a pork chop and it was very liberating. He was self-taught, and it was a case of "what's in the cupboard?" I had a great time, but after 18 months, I'd had enough of his sunshine cuisine.'

Still, after a stint at Bentley's in Piccadilly - to which we shall return - Corrigan found himself answering Bull's siren call once again. Bull was to open a restaurant in an unprepossessing stretch of the Fulham Road, and Corrigan was to be its head chef. It is several years since this establishment closed (Bull now runs a gastropub in his native Wales), but there are many people - myself included - who still mourn Fulham Road. The food was something else. This time, Corrigan put together a menu that was all his own: it was very British food, but executed without a hint of stodge. His faggots were legendary. 'We opened in 1994; eight months later, we had a Michelin star, one of the fastest ever to be won.' Six months after that, however, Corrigan walked. 'I was stressed. I was heading for burn-out.'

An itinerant stint followed. He oversaw the setting of an ill-fated new restaurant at an East London dog track, and ran Searcy's at the Barbican. Then, finally, he got himself a decent business partner, and opened Lindsay House. It is bliss, Lindsay House, a set of elegant Georgian rooms where you can eat a menu that is both seasonal and resolutely un-modish: braised hare with polenta, rabbit terrine, pike and eel pâté, braised chicken with colcannon. I suspect it is also the only place in London where you can order a plate of crisp-fried crubeens for your dinner (crubeens are pig's trotters that have been first cooked in stock). The place is also blessed with delightful staff. A month ago, I had dinner there. It was late, and the room was entirely empty apart from me. Then in came Simon Callow, presumably hot from some performance. Emitting a theatrically weary sigh, he sat down at his corner table. 'I would like you to feed me, to water me, to restore me,' he enunciated, feebly (or words to that effect). 'Oh, and some olives would be nice too.' The maitre d' looked so sympathetic at this display of luvvie neediness that I would not have been at all surprised if he had returned to the table carrying a cold compress with which to mop Callow's fevered brow.

But back to our trip. Ireland has enjoyed an eating revolution in recent years. 'The most fundamental change has been the creation of a class of artisan producers and - just as important - the respect and status afforded them by their customers,' says John McKenna, editor of the Bridgestone Irish Food Guide. 'There are now people who shop at farmers' markets, and who know the names of the people who make the foods that they buy. We now have the luxury of real choice.' County Cork is at the heart of this revolution, a change that has been led, more often than not, by women (and the godmother of them all is considered to be Myrtle Allen, founder of the famed Ballymaloe House, a hotel and cookery school where - yippee! - we are to stay tonight). In West Cork alone, it would be possible to stay for a month, dine like a king every day, and never have to visit the same place twice. Even the tiniest of towns are home to fully signed-up members of the Slow Food movement. The only possible hitch might be getting into places at the top of your list. In Kinsale, for instance, there is a little restaurant called Fishy Fishy. The queue outside on a Saturday lunchtime has to be seen to be believed.

So, we have a lot to get through. Day one: first, we visit the Belvelly Smokehouse in Cobh, where Frank Hederman, a zany enthusiast, smokes some of the fish you can eat at Lindsay House. The smokehouse is about the size of a small garden shed, the salting rooms not much bigger, but the produce itself is delicious - as far from the slimy pink stuff you buy in the supermarket as you can imagine. Richard loves it. (I notice, and this will become something of a pattern, that he takes plenty of edible souvenirs home with him.) From here, we drive to Ballymaloe House, where we are to have dinner with John McKenna. Dinner at Ballymaloe is a treat, and not only because of, say, the hot oysters with buerre blanc. In the dining room, it is worth paying attention to the paintings on the walls, some of which are very fine indeed. Plus - and this is a big plus - Ballymaloe still cleaves unfashionably to its pudding trolley, which is laden with huge jugs of double cream. Hard not to try everything. We go to bed in the small hours, after whiskey and a loud sing-song (only in Ireland, eh?).

Day two. I wake up early with a throbbing head. In the dining room, Richard is already tucking in to a plate of black and white pudding, having already dispatched a bowl of Macroom porridge oats. He looks tired but no matter: he is keeping up a nice monologue on the subject of pretty much everything that passes his lips. From here, we head to the Sunday market at Schull, a tiny village in West Cork. It seems amazing that so small a place as this can sustain such an enterprise as a market, but it does, somehow. Richard putters round, trying everything he possibly can, from pickled bladderwrack (ugh! it is still only about 10 in the morning) to smoked goat's cheese. His favourite discovery is the brawn on Frank Krawczyk's stall. Brawn, which is made from pigs' heads (you use the tongue, but not the brain) and trotters, plus any shin beef you might happen to have handy, is mighty unfashionable these days, but Richard loves it, one wobbly, grey slice after another disappearing between his peony lips. Finally, we meet up with Fingal Ferguson, whose smoked produce is selling like hot cakes; the idea is that we will follow him back to his farm for lunch.

The Ferguson family embody the new Cork ethos, and Richard and I fall in love with them immediately. Milk from Tom Ferguson's prized herd of cows is made into Gubbeen cheese by his wife, Giana. Some of the cheese is then smoked by Fingal, Tom and Giana's son, along with bacon, salamis and a fantastic chorizo, made with meat from the family's pigs. Meanwhile, down the hill, Fingal's sister, Clovisse, sells the organic vegetables she grows beside the smokehouse. Giana has made lunch, a delicious ham served with salad from Clovisse's garden, and creamy slices of Gubbeen cheese. It's an idyllic scene, sort of Famous Five meets Cold Comfort Farm. Then, it's back in the car. We stop for Guinness in Schull (Hackett's Bar - an Irish pub straight out of central casting), before heading for Kinsale, where we are to have dinner at a restaurant called Casino House. It's a long drive, and by the time we check in to our hotel (the beautiful Perryville House with bay views), I am beat. I gaze at my bed. But if I lie down, there is every chance that I might never get up again.

After another night of indulgence, our final morning begins early, with poached eggs. For our final stop, we are to press on yet deeper into the countryside to visit Corrigan's beef supplier, Gerry Nolan. The man's cows are, Richard tells me, the 'happiest you'll ever see - the man loves those cows, they're treated like gods'. After meeting them - and it is true, they do look happy - we sit in Liam's bungalow eating the scones his wife has made us for breakfast. Richard is scoffing and eating, eating and scoffing, and I am longing for the relative calm of Cork airport. On the drive there, I ask him where he gets his prodigious energy. He shrugs. He denies being driven. 'If you're too driven, I don't think you're happy,' he says. However energetic he seems - shuttling round town on his scooter, looking like a brown bear on a unicycle - he does not respond well to stress. 'After 9/11, we lost 20 covers a night. Jesus, I was stressed. I got alopecia.' How does he keep his marriage together? Kitchen hours are never good for relationships, and then there are all his late-night sessions in the Groucho Club. 'Honesty is not an overvalued thing. The day you start telling lies is the day it all goes wrong. So I'm straightforward. She was f***ing pissed off with me the other night. She asked me where I had been, and I said: "The Groucho. I drank four whisky sours." The fury on her face! But if you walk into my house, there are flowers everywhere. Beautiful roses. They certainly help. And I never let her fish for compliments. I just give it to her, baby. I never stop.'

Two years ago, a newspaper sent an undercover reporter into Corrigan's kitchen; the result, it was alleged, was that the chef got rather, shall we say, physical with his new recruit. But when I ask him about this, he just laughs. 'It was Valentine's night. This guy turned up. He said he was Brazilian. But he kept saying: 'Can I go for a break? Can I have a cigarette?' What do you expect when you ask those kind of questions? Anyone would have got the same treatment. I said: Are you off your f***ing head, you little arsehole? And he failed to mention in that article that after service at 1.30am, I got everyone drinks and I went to Chinatown and bought food for everyone. We were there till 3.30am. He failed to put that in his goddam article. The only thing I can say is: don't ask me for a cigarette break at nine o'clock at night.'

So does he have a temper? I think he probably does. But he has a long serving staff and is a determinedly fair and thoughtful man; a reader of the Guardian and Seamus Heaney.

What next? When we meet up after our trip, Corrigan has news. 'I've bought Bentley's,' he says. 'I had to do it. There's only so much debt that can sit on Lindsay House's back without breaking it. But I've been after Bentley's for years.' He has finished filming Full on Food - about which he seems somewhat relieved - but he will do more in the future. 'Gordon [Ramsay] said to me: "You should pull your f***ing finger out, and do some TV." I didn't even have an agent - his people helped negotiate for me.' But why? AA Gill, the preposterously hard-to-please restaurant critic, says Corrigan is one of the 'three best cooks in the city and, quite possibly, Europe'; the food writer Matthew Fort has called him 'one of the most outstanding culinary talents of a generation'. Why faff about with TV when he could be in the kitchen? 'I was shocked [by what Gordon said], but he's right. It's fine being known by a group of fanatics, but it's a crazy world out there. We have to expose ourselves.'

Corrigan's food heroes

Krawczyk's West Cork Salamis

Frank Krawczyk's Bolg Doire - a cross between speck and pancetta using belly of free-range pork which is rolled, dry-cured, then smoked with beech or oak before air-drying - is addictive and unique. Try his pastrami and brawn.

· Try Schull's Sunday market to find him, or buy direct from The Barn, Dereenatra, Schull; 00 353 28 28579; frankk@oceanfree.net

Macroom Oatmeal

No breakfast at Ballymaloe House would be complete without Donal Creedon's porridge oats, which have been hand-roasted on the traditional cast-iron plate at his mill in Macroom since the early 1800s. Wonderful with cream, honey or a splash of Irish whiskey.

· Kanturk; 00 353 26 41 800 (and from Neal's Yard)

The Farmgate, Midleton

Máróg O'Brien will serve you lunch like mother used to make. Excellent fresh fish, the most marvellous roast potatoes and fantastic cakes. Next to the dining room is a good deli.

· Coolbawn, Midleton; 00 353 21 463 2771

Gubbeen Farmhouse Products

Milk from Tom Ferguson's prize herd is made into creamy cheese by his wife, Giana, some of which is smoked by their son, Fingal, along with smoked bacon, chorizo and salami. Daughter Clovisse grows vegetables and herbs.

· Gubbeen, Schull; 028 28231; www.gubbeen.com (and from Neal's Yard)

Casino House

A lovely dining room, with food to match. Michael Relja is in the kitchen, turning out dishes of local rabbit and salmon, goat's cheese and wild garlic spaetzle, while his wife, Kerrin works the front of house. They live upstairs, which gives the restaurant a cosy feel in spite of its isolation.

· Coolmain Bay, Kilbrittain, West Cork; 00 353 23 49944; chouse@eircom.net

Midelton Market

This amazing Saturday market, the Irish version of Borough market, in London, only began trading in 2000. Look for Willie Scannell's potatoes.

· www.midletonfarmersmarket.com

Belvelly Smokehouse

Frank Hederman smokes his eels, sprats, mackerel, trout and mussels over beech rather than oak, which gives his products a mild, subtle flavour and makes them just about the best that money can buy. Once you have tasted his smoked salmon, you're unlikely to want to eat any other kind. The smokehouse is open to visitors.

· Cobh; 00 353 21 481 1089