It is not often that the Late Review, BBC2's well-mannered cultural forum for the arts, provides the TV highlight of the week, but nine days ago, during a discussion of two imminent feature films based on the Bloody Sunday shootings in Derry 30 years ago, the show's carefully observed protocol was ruptured by an explosion of anger from its reigning controversialist, the Northern Irish poet and essayist, Tom Paulin.

Incensed by fellow panellist Germaine Greer's intimation of sympathy for the Paratroopers who had killed 13 civilians, Paulin countered by accusing her of talking 'rubbish' and then shouting that 'they [the Paratroopers] were thugs sent in by public school boys to kill innocent Irish people. They were rotten racist bastards!'

Needless to say, it made for riveting viewing, not least because impromptu outbursts of righteous indignation seem to have disappeared from our screens - in tandem with the BBC's original arts remit - in this age of dull consensus. The set-to, in which the poet and the feminist academic tried to shout each other down, ignoring attempts to arbitrate by the host, Kirsty Wark, was closer to a pub scrap than the etiquette of the studio debate.

When I visit Paulin in Oxford to ponder his unique role in contemporary British culture - as an academic, respected poet and essayist, and, courtesy of his Late Review appearances, cultural commentator-as-cult-figure - he seems refreshingly unapologetic. 'I only felt bad because I'd put Kirsty in a difficult position,' he muses, his face creasing into a rueful smile. 'It must be a bit of a nuisance trying to control me when I lose the bap like that.'

After a short discussion on the possible derivation of the term 'to lose the bap', vernacular language being one of his specialities, I ask Paulin whether his temper had ever compromised his intellectual rigour. This, after all, is a man whose typically Northern Irish bluntness has led to a series of high-profile feuds: in the late Eighties, he fell out with poet Craig Raine after a disagreement over Milton went public in the letters page of the London Review of Books. His first great televised outburst occurred in 1992, when he accused Anthony Thwaite, editor of the Selected Letters of Philip Larkin, of censoring the dead poet's more extreme racist comments.

Then, Paulin's metamorphosis into a kind of academic Paisleyite - he called Thwaite 'a little balsawood minor man of letters' - made the recent tiff with Greer look like a playground squabble. Recently, he has also fought in defence of Edward Said, with the Guardian columnist, Ian Buruma, whom he called a Zionist. As Christopher Reid, his erstwhile poetry editor at Faber & Faber, once memorably put it, 'Tom is one of the great disagree-ers'.

'I'm sure there must be a term in classical rhetoric for the act of losing your temper because it's the only appropriate response,' he insists. 'In the sort of Puritan tradition I'm coming from, there is the notion of "sacred vehemence", which is akin to Yeats's "passionate intensity". It maintains that if you don't get angry, you've copped out, and if you do get angry, you've copped out.' He ponders this moral impasse. 'Funny, that, eh? And, very, very English.'

This kind of literary, surreal association is one of the reasons why his appearances on the Late Review are often the sole reason for watching a show that seems limp when he is absent.

'Tom works on television because he's passionate,' his erstwhile Late Review foil, the novelist and journalist, Tony Parsons, says. 'He's not dry or pompous like most academics, and he's not there just for the sake of being on TV. He's genuine and he often has a truly radical take on things.'

Some, though, find his tendency towards critical extremism irritating: when not enthusing wildly, he tends to be dismissive. Like Greer, his take on popular culture can be off the mark. 'He doesn't have the usual reference points,' Parsons points out. 'He's more Milton than Elvis, and that can show. The silence when himself or Germaine feel something is not worth talking about can be hell for the other contributors.'

More entertainingly, he seems to possess a world view that, as Parsons once put it, 'is balanced perfectly between common sense and complete madness'. Hence his unlikely elevation to cult status: he is certainly the only academic to have an indie band named after him.

With a critically acclaimed book on his hero, William Hazlitt, under his belt, and several volumes of verse on the shelves, including last year's often startling volume, The Wind Dog, I wondered if being better known for his TV appearances bothered him at all.

'Well, not really,' he counters, in a voice that, when it isn't cawing in indignation, is strangely luxuriant and laid-back. 'People in academe communicate with a very limited and privileged number of people, while there's a whole world out there who are reading books and are hungry for real debate. There's this great line in Conrad's Lord Jim: "In the destructive element, immerse yourself." Well, television is today's destructive element in a sense: it's mostly ephemeral, often superficial, and most of it is shite and unwatchable. But we still have programmes that consider ideas, that debate the arts, and I think they are worth supporting.'

Paulin, by his own admission, comes from 'a dying breed of old middle-class, Protestant, socialist dissenters'. Born in Leeds in 1949, he grew up on North Parade, off Belfast's tribally divided Ormeau Road, both his parents belonging to the Northern Ireland Labour Party. In that truculent city, his creative and political roots were formed, then their mettle tested by the state's brutal response to the ascendant civil rights movement of 1968. He came of age as part of the new wave of Northern Irish poets in the Sixties, including Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Derek Mahon, and Ciaran Carson. Unlike many contemporaries, he is not of the nature tradition, indeed many of his early poems are set in ominous, troubled, landscapes - the 'sweep of broken road between two guarded towns'. He once described his style as 'fucked-up and abstract'.

Politically too, he occupies a slippery terrain: he is a Northern Irish Protestant who also values a currently overlooked strand of British thought, 'the patriotism of Hazlitt, Blake and Orwell'. To this end, bankrolled by a much-publicised £75,000 grant from the National Endowment of Science, Technology and the Arts, his current big project is the creation of an epic poem about the Second World War. It will 'affirm the struggle and memory of the generation that fought the war ... before the doors of memory are closed on it'.

Many of his early poems, though, such as the melancholy 'An Ulster Unionist Walks the Streets of London', have grappled with the torturous nature of loyalist identity, which increasingly seems both unshakeable and fragile. The equally thorny issues of belonging and cultural reinvention were broached provocatively in his first volume of essays, Ireland and the English Crisis.

Alongside the actor Stephen Rea, he is one of that ultra-rare Northern Irish hybrid species, the Protestant republican, though his republicanism is cut more from English Miltonian cloth than any Irish tribal one. He believes that a unified Ireland is 'the only possible solution', a political epiphany that, he says, occurred belatedly, some seven or eight years after Bloody Sunday. 'You arrive at these moments of clarity if you think about history in any engaged and meaningful way, don't you?' he says, looking pained. 'I originally thought that the state was capable of repealing itself. Then, I began to realise that it was not.'

He speaks of national identity often being forged 'in a sense of emergency, one of those historical moments in which national cultures discover stuff that they may have forgotten. Or buried.' He now suspects that the English sense of identity is undergoing a similar, if less traumatic, self-analysis.

Paulin has called the Good Friday Agreement 'a truly radical document', but given the current state of affairs - the rancour and violence surrounding the Holy Cross School protests, the slaying of the Catholic postal worker Daniel McColgan recently - does he feel optimistic about the future?

'Well, it's hard to, isn't it? These are dangerous, uncertain times. The place is more divided than ever. It's deeply depressing, isn't it? Another young life taken like that...' He lapses into an uncharacteristically long pause. 'One feels at the moment that there has been so much critical analysis of unionism that now is not really the time to be engaging in it, so ragged and distressed is the loyalist identity. In fact, in a way, though I would not want to offend the relatives of the dead, these very powerful Bloody Sunday films are not coming out at the right point for the peace process.'

When I ask Paulin if he has ever been the target of abuse from disgruntled loyalists, he answers, 'Just the usual stuff, insults, the odd death threat.'

Lately, too, he has faced a barrage of criticism, mostly in the Guardian letters page, for his criticism of Israel's treatment of the Palestinians. A recent poem, 'Killed In Crossfire', published in The Observer, was censured by, among others, the novelist and journalist Linda Grant, and Neville Nagler from the Board of Deputies of British Jews. Miriam Gross of the Sunday Telegraph called it 'vile' adding that, 'the implication that Palestinian boys are being deliberately gunned down' was 'grotesque'.

Paulin remains unbowed. 'Ach, she's a fool!' he splutters. 'Palestinian boys are being deliberately gunned down. And, Linda Grant is an emotional fool. She epitomises the culture of avoidance, emotion and guilt and anxiety you come up against. How can you not have a political position unless you're a particularly complex, sophisticated kind of artist, which none of those journos even begin to be? They're nowhere near that level of consciousness. They're incapable of it. Same with Buruma. He tried to smear me with being an anti-Semite, but he hadn't the guts to do it. He's taking a Zionist position in attacking Said. It's implicit in what he writes. Look, you're either a Zionist or an anti-Zionist, there's no middle way. Everyone who supports the state of Israel is a Zionist.'

Paulin considers the West's sympathetic relationship to Israel, and Israel's oppression of the Palestinians, as one of 'the crucial issues of our time', and as central to attempts to understand what happened on 11 September. 'That was like the beginning of a third world war, and we're going to be in this for the rest of our lives. If you look at history, you see that the problem is the creation of these, what A.J.P. Taylor called "ahistorical states" like Israel, which have been plucked out of the air by powerful nation states as short-term solutions.'

Interesting, then, that Paulin's own homeland could be viewed as an 'ahistorical state' and that, in a way, 11 September was Northern Irish terrorism transposed to a global scale. 'Well, Northern Ireland is an example of how temporary imposed solutions don't work. It's ironic that early on in the war with Afghanistan, the Americans and the British were saying, "we recognise there must be a Palestinian state", then they rapidly forgot about it. I think history will show that that kind of amnesia will come back to haunt you.'

Tom Paulin once described himself as 'just a failed historian'. Increasingly, whether writing poetry, responding to the latest Keanu Reeves' vehicle or to what he perceives to be liberal guilt and fence-sitting, he has become that rare thing in contemporary British culture - the writer as conscience.