HOME FIRE BYRNE-ING

BEVERLY HILLS - Step into Gabriel Byrne's Tudor style home and you feel you've been transported to Ireland.

Inside his little slice of Dublin, sandwiched in the midst of mega-mansions, old wood floors are smothered with faded, worn-thin oriental rugs. Shelf-lined walls hold hundreds of leather-bound books.

"The savage seeks his native shore," says the thoughtful Byrne, with a wry smile. "A friend of mine says he always expects to walk in here and find the hearth fire burning, me sitting smoking a clay pipe, colleens dancing on the stairs and an old man playing the fiddle."

In truth, the handsome black-haired, blue-eyed Byrne has been living in the house alone for 2 1/2 years. "Ever since we split up (he and Ellen Barkin are separated). "My assistant is staying here now while she finds a place to live, and it's so weird to have someone else making noise in the house. I'm so used to silence."

The quietly eloquent Byrne stars as a gangster in Mad Dog Time, written and directed by Larry Bishop, son of the late Joey Bishop.

"I'd never read a script like this," Byrne says. "It's set in a surreal universe where the characters deal with the basic issues of life; how you live your life, how you face your death and how you love."

The other draw was the cast, which includes an eclectic group ranging from Richard Dreyfuss, Rob Reiner and Richard Pryor to Billy Idol, Paul Anka and Burt Reynolds. "Every day there was someone new on the set, someone I admired and wanted to work with," including Barkin. They worked together in Siesta ('87) and Into the West ('93), and when Byrne read the Mad Dog script, he suggested her for the role of a gangster moll.

Must be one amicable separation. So was it uncomfortable? "No, no, no," Byrne says. No tension? "Maybe a little on the very first morning because it was her first day. Apart from that it was fun."

This gentle Irishman, who appears next in Smilla's Sense of Show with Julia Ormond, is content to live and work in L.A. "I'm here because my kids are here." Jack, 8 and Romy, 3, live nearby with Barkin and are frequent visitors to his house. That's why, in the tree-covered backyard, a trampoline waits patiently and a brightly colored tricycle sleeps on its side.

Byrne has heard the snipes about how shallow and transparent L.A. is. He counters: "I've met amazing, tremendous people here. So how do you define a place? By a generalization, by its cliches or do you define it by your own experience? . . . Sure, there's plastic people here. They're everywhere."

Byrne does find the disconnection of L.A life unsettling. The only neighbor he has seen strolling his street is Ronald Reagan, who had bodyguards with him.

That's a far cry from Ireland where the homes may be miles apart. "There, everyone knows everyone and their business", says Byrne, 46, the son of a brewery worker and a nurse, who grew up in an impoverished land of farms, haycarts, sheep, and horses. "They can tell you what you had for breakfast" he says, "even if you live 10 miles away."