Irish novelist and award-winning short story writer Julian Gough has launched a scathing attack on his country's authors, describing them as "a pompous, provincial literary community" which has "become a priestly caste, scribbling by candlelight, cut off from the electric current of the culture".

"We've abolished the Catholic clergy, and replaced them with novelists. They wear black, they preach, they are concerned for our souls. Feck off," said Gough, whose short story The Orphan and the Mob won the National Short Story prize in 2007. The author of novels including Juno and Juliet, about identical twin sisters, Gough grew up in Ireland but now lives in Berlin. He said that he hardly ever read Irish writers any more, because he has been disappointed so often.

New, young writers mostly produce "grittily realistic, slightly depressing descriptions of events that aren't very interesting", he wrote in what he described as an "intemperate rant", posted on his website.

"Though, to be fair, sometimes it's sub-Joycean, slightly depressing descriptions of events that aren't very interesting," he added. And it wasn't only the new generation of Irish authors which came under attack from Gough. "The older, more sophisticated Irish writers that want to be Nabokov give me the yellow squirts and a scaldy hole," he said. "If there is a movement in Ireland, it is backwards. Novel after novel set in the nineteen seventies, sixties, fifties. Reading award-winning Irish literary fiction, you wouldn't know television had been invented. Indeed, they seem apologetic about acknowledging electricity ... The only area where Irish writing is thriving in Ireland itself is on the internet, because it's a direct connection, writer-to-reader. Blogs captured, and capture, Ireland in a way literature no longer does."

Sebastian Barry, the Irish author who won the 2009 Costa book of the year award for his novel The Secret Scripture, said that Gough was both "completely right and completely wrong" about Irish writing – but added that he himself would have said the same thing "word for word" 30 years ago. "There is a feeling you want to clear out everything, and that's what I'm getting from it," he said of Gough's opinion, describing the author as "a very wonderful writer".

"The piece is more about his state of mind – he wants to start building afresh, which is what he's doing," said Barry. "If he's in any way referring to me with his darker words, then so be it – next time I'm in Berlin, he and I will have to sit down and have an Irish whiskey and an arm wrestle."

The Booker prize-winning Irish novelist John Banville also agreed that Gough "has a point, or more than one point", but added that "his notion that shouting the word 'feck' – Father Ted has a lot to answer for – and being grossly scatological will make him seem echt Irish only harms his argument".

"We who were born and continue to live in Ireland are always distressed by the stage-Irish antics so often to be encountered among the sons and daughters of the diaspora," said Banville. "But it is true, as the critic Declan Kiberd remarks, that no contemporary Irish writer has yet attempted the Great Irish Novel on social and political themes. Where is our Middlemarch, our Doctor Zhivago, our Rabbit trilogy? The fact is Irish fiction tends to be poetic rather than prosaic, which is something that non-Irish reviewers find hard to grasp. John McGahern used to say that there is verse and there is prose, and then there is poetry, and poetry can occur in either form, and that in Ireland it occurs more often in prose than in verse. There may be a grittily realistic novelist even now writing a masterpiece such as Mr Gough says he longs for, and, if so, I applaud her/him."

Although prize-winning Irish novelist Emma Donoghue said that "Roddy Doyle and Joe O'Connor have proved that there's nothing 'backwards' in writing about the past", Paul Murray, another Irish writer whose second novel Skippy Dies has just been published, agreed with Gough that Irish writing was failing to tackle the modern world. "It is disappointing when you read a young novelist who seems to make no effort at all to engage with modernity. And it does happen," said Murray. "On the one hand I do believe authors should write what they want, on the other it is slightly disingenuous to ignore modernity, and it seems there is a danger that the Irish novel could become this nostalgic form where readers go to get images of priests and donkeys and so on."

Gough said today that he was "fighting with one hand behind my back, because I have great respect" for writers such as Banville and Barry, but admitted that he does "want to arm wrestle". The "funeral-in-the-rain Irish novel", he said, "does tend to win the Booker or the Costa", but where, he asked, are the books dealing with the Irish experience over the last decade and a half? "Individual writers haven't necessarily lost their nerve, but they're writing about eras which they're more confident in – you see it in England too, with Amis going back to the 1970s, finding it hard to pin down the modern moment. Some of the younger generation are still writing McGahern-esque stories, and for me that is missing the point of being an Irish writer," he told the Guardian.

"The role of the Irish writer is not really to win prizes in Ireland; their role historically has been to get kicked out of the country for telling the truth. And there's not quite enough of that going on. Just when we need a furious army of novelists, we are getting fairly polite stuff published by Faber & Faber that fits into the grand tradition," he continued. "At the moment Ireland has one, massively developed, lyrical realism arm which is all biceps, and the other arm, the odd, freaky, tattooed arm, needs to be built up. In a way I'm trying to rally a few young writers around a flag which hasn't been waved in a while. You can't save the world with a novel, but it can put a tiny featherweight on the scales."