Inspired by his Da

One morning, a few years after the 1994 ceasefire in Northern Ireland, Martin Lynch realised his life had changed. 'I had lived my entire life in the shadow of the Troubles,' he says. 'But suddenly the streets had no barricades, the bombs had stopped, and our city had started to resemble Leeds again.

I thought back on the 34 years of political upheaval my community had suffered, and thought: I want to write a comedy about this.'

The History Of The Troubles (Accordin' To My Da) opens tonight, but it wasn't so long ago that Lynch himself was directly caught up in the chaos it chronicles. At 20, he joined the Republican movement, having previously worked in the Belfast docks with his father. 'The Troubles were just starting,' he says. 'There was a lot of physical activity. I did many things I now regret.'

He could have carried on, become another statistic perhaps, but instead he saw John Arden's The Non-Stop Connolly Show - and it blew his mind. 'I was staggered by the notion that people could pretend to be someone else and yet still be persuasive,' he says. 'I had never been to the theatre before... But I thought that if I could transfer the political contents of the newspapers on to the stage, maybe the revolution would happen earlier. So I decided to write a play.'

Since those heady, youthful times, Lynch has become one of Northern Ireland's most prolific playwrights. In the late 1970s, Belfast's Group Theatre reopened after a bomb closed it; Lynch put on a play called Taking The Barricades Down and it promptly sold out. The Lyric Theatre in Belfast offered him a writer's residency and he 'signed off the dole'.

Lynch says now that he had always been a writer of sorts: 'I used to sit down with my guitar and write political songs. I've always been interested in art as protest.' What he didn't initially realise was that people weren't coming to see his work because of its politics, but because it was funny. He rejects the notion, though, that being able to find comedy in the Troubles, in the way Martin McDonagh recently did with The Lieutenant Of Inishmore, suggests that people are starting to move on. 'People have always been able to laugh at appalling things.'

As his career became established (he is best known over here for the screenplay to 1987's A Prayer For The Dying), so his politics softened, his anger subsided and his desire for a long-lasting peace solidified.

His new play uses a cast of three to examine the impact of the 1969 Loyalist riots, the internment policies of the 1970s and the 1994 ceasefire on a man who can't see the logic in the cycles of violence.

'It was partly inspired by my own father,' Lynch says. 'The Troubles dramatically affected the relationship between fathers and sons. Sons, for example, saw their fathers do terrible things that no son should see a father do. For me, it was the reverse: my dad - who was a big bloke, and who had given us a difficult time, messing my mum about - was absolutely terrified during the 1969 riots. That made him more human in my eyes.'

He is not optimistic about the chances for peace: 'Too many people want different things.' But he is optimistic about his play. 'It's sold out everywhere in Belfast. I'm hoping it will do the same here.'