The playwright on a contemporary he considers one of the most influential playwrights of his generation MYhero is Billy Roche, because he's a musician, a novelist, a playwright and an actor, and is the only Irish playwright to have had four plays running in London at the same time, which is an amazing achievement.

I first came across him on the Late Late Show with Gay Byrne in the early 1990s, and he was talking about these plays he had written about life in Wexford Town, called 'The Wexford Trilogy'. He couldn't get them on in Ireland, even though some people were championing his work, but he managed to get them on at the Bush theatre in London and they were a huge success there.

A Handful of Stars (1988) was his first one, and went on to win the John Whiting and Plays and Players Awards. I found that all really interesting, because I was about 21, and had just started writing at that time.

As I listened to him speak, I began to realise that there was something very different about Billy. He was his own man, had a guitar with him on the show and, as he sat there playing his songs, I felt there was something incredibly unpretentious about him.

I went down to Wexford to see some of his plays, and they really struck me, because of their emotional power. Billy was able to find the drama there in a way that was completely ordinary and grounded.

I think that theatre in Ireland had become the domain of the intellectuals, but Billy's plays were about the huge things that happen to ordinary people, liking falling in and out of love. They were set in Wexford in small places where a whole universe of activity and emotion happens, such as a snooker hall, a betting shop, and a barber shop.

When I began to have trouble getting my own plays on in Dublin, I realised that I'd have to go the Billy Roche route and the fact that he had been successful that way really inspired and encouraged me. My work was accepted by London's Bush TONTheatre too, and it was then that I started making a living as a playwright.

The funny thing is that, while I was there, Billy's name was always about the place. He was someone that all these people that worked there had really looked up to . . . he was like a god. They were always telling me how his plays were amazing, with people queuing down the stairs for tickets and the audiences being really moved.

A couple of years later, I was making a film, and somebody suggested Billy for a small part, as he also did some acting. We got him in, and that was when I really started to get to know him as a person. He struck me as one of those people who had an enormous sense of wisdom about him, with a great sense of life going on.

He's like a character out of one of his own plays in some ways, because he has loads of stories to tell and is always very upbeat.

To me, it seems that Billy has that very 'old wisdom of the seasons changing', and there's a very ancient pre-Christian wisdom in his plays, and he has had a huge influence on me.

Because his plays are grounded in ordinary things and places, it's taken a long time for him to enter the consciousness of Ireland, but now his play The Cavalcaders is going to be on soon as a main stage production in the Abbey.

Billy started off being a musician, and was lead singer in a band called The Roach Band, which I think was a cross between one of the old showbands and punk! There's a real sense of showmanship about him, and he was always really concerned about putting on a good performance. He also wrote a novel called Tumbling Down, which is a lovely little book and is really about his life growing up in Wexford.

Billy's Trilogy was filmed for the BBC, and he wrote the screenplay for the film Trojan Eddie which received the Best Film Award at the San Sebastian Film Festival in 1996.

He spent about 10 years writing a book of short stories called Tales from Rainwater Pond, and we've been working on the screenplay for one of them on and off over the past two years, and now it looks as though we have the finance for it. So I'm still tied up in Billy's world all of these years later.

Nothing gives me more pleasure than working with Billy, because I find it really hard writing with other people but we just completely click. I can tend to overcomplicate things at times, and am always looking to see how to justify things, but Billy sees the drama in the most simple stuff and shows me how it will justify itself.

He makes it happen, and he makes it rock and roll!

Billy still lives in Wexford with his wife Patty, and they have three grown-up daughters, so I have a feeling there's a big King Lear-type play coming from him! He has a baby grandson, and Patty was describing to me recently how Billy sits on the couch playing the guitar, and the baby just stares up at him in adoration. I was just thinking about what an ubernuclear type of grandad he would be, and how amazing it will be for a baby to have a grandfather who was a kind of troubadour, and could sing songs and was a writer and an actor and a playwright.

Conor McPherson's moving and compassionate play about alcoholism, 'Dublin Carol', is on at Andrews Lane Theatre from 30 March to 14 April. Bookings (01) 679 5720