One of Ireland’s most critically acclaimed novelists has warned that the country’s referendum on abortion in May could be a “Brexit/Trump” moment for Ireland, exposing similar divisions between rural voters and city-dwellers.

Patrick McCabe, the author of bestsellers The Butcher Boy and Breakfast on Pluto, both made into feature films, said there was a danger that sections of the “metropolitan media in Dublin” could alienate voters in rural constituencies and help usher in a no vote against abortion reform.

McCabe, twice nominated for the Booker prize, said parts of the Dublin media should never ignore the importance of the midwest and western parts of Ireland where his latest novel, Heartland, is set. He grew up in Clones, County Monaghan.

“The referendum is going to be interesting, and it is going to be tight. The Dublin media look upon the people from places such as where I am from like ‘local colour’; they are the types who they’d like to have at the party but would never like to see them having a ring around their daughter’s finger. They look down on these people for their uncouthness and boorishness; they say the same kind of things that their media counterparts in America would say about the deep south.”

On 25 May, Irish voters are being asked to repeal article 40.3.3 of the republic’s constitution, which is known as the eighth amendment. Since it was introduced via previous referendum in 1983, the eighth amendment has given unborn foetuses and pregnant mothers an equal right to life under the constitution.

If Ireland votes in favour of repeal, the government in Dublin has said that it will introduce legislation allowing for abortions in Irish hospitals during the first 12 weeks of pregnancy. The latest opinion polls show a two-thirds majority in favour of reform.

It may be their big statement in the way that Trump was in America Patrick McCabe

McCabe said the referendum “might well be” the opportunity for the rural population of Ireland to revolt against what people in this part of the country perceive as the liberal elite, just as occurred in the Brexit vote and US presidential election. “It may be their big statement in the way that Trump was in America. Isn’t that what happened when the centre of that country voted against the sophisticated types?”

He added: “I really don’t like this finger-wagging from the media elite. I don’t like the primness of it, and the liberals are very good at this primness. Maybe that is what the boy in the tractor in the rural parts of Ireland will look on and say, ‘If you keep wagging that finger, I will bite it off.’”

Speaking before the launch of Heartland, a dark tale of murder and mayhem largely set in an Irish midwest bar, McCabe said his time in the US during the run-up to the 2016 presidential election gave him an understanding as to why so many Americans voted for Donald Trump, putting him into the White House.

Lecturing during the campaign at Pittsburgh University, McCabe said he drove across the US midwest and visited the places that opted for Trump against Hillary Clinton.

“I was in America at that time when Trump was campaigning, and emotionally my sympathies were far and away with the people who voted for him. Intellectually, there is no way I would support him, but I could understand the motive as to why ordinary people were voting for him. If you look at these movements against what Trump stands for currently, they always seem to be middle class and bourgeois; there don’t seem to be many cleaners among them.

“When I was in America I can remember meeting this man of the land with an old straw hat driving a flatbed truck. He was talking away to me about an old world that my father would have recognised. He had certain moral codes and told me he no longer felt he had a place in the present world now.”

While distancing himself from Trump’s politics, McCabe said: “I am not one of these twittering liberals who say all is ruined. There is a great friend of mine who is a folklorist from America, who has just spent a long time in [County] Fermanagh.

“He is a mountain man from Virginia and is renowned across the United States. I remember being with him when I was over there, and he twisted the ends of his moustache one day and said to me, ‘We’ve got a problem because the Democrats are just too sweet and wholesome. They don’t know the one end of a gun from the next!’. So I wasn’t surprised by Trump getting in – but, besides, at 63 years of age, what else is going to surprise me?”

McCabe said that the fictional Glasson County, in which he sets his story of revenge, torture, heavy drinking and bloody reckoning, could easily be transposed from the Irish midlands to the heartlands of the south and midwest of America.

“My people come from County Tyrone and I spent a lot of my time in County Longford. I have to tell you they are very similar people to the so-called redneck areas of the United States.

“It’s all about the language for me more than anything else. My aunts all spoke in that kind of metaphor language, things like ‘He drove his pigs to the wrong market thon boy’, and you hear that kind of stuff in parts of America too.

“There is a bar in Scotstown in County Monaghan I know where the characters could easily fit into somewhere in the Appalachian mountains.”

Ireland is to vote on abortion law reform next month. In a referendum on 25 May, voters will decide if they want to repeal an article in the republic’s constitution known as the eighth amendment.

The amendment, or article 40.3.3 of the constitution, gives unborn foetuses and pregnant mothers an equal right to life – in effect a ban on abortion. Currently, terminations are allowed only when the life of the mother is at risk, with a penalty of up to 14 years in prison for breaking the law.

The government in Dublin has promised to introduce legislation allowing for abortions during the first 12 weeks of pregnancy if the vote goes in favour of repeal.