"I remember saying we were going to make a film about nothing, " recalls Abrahamson, now renowned as the director of the award-winning Adam & Paul and more recently Garage and RTE's Prosperity. "It was a time when so many shorts were very earnest, often about the North or Irish identity or the church, with lots of crucifixes and quietly weeping women, so we just made this film about three guys trying to do their laundry." Seen by only a handful of people, despite winning the best European short award at Cork, 3 Joes became the springboard for a new generation of Irish filmmakers.

"That was the first proper thing any of us had done, " says Guiney. "In a way everything grew out of 3 Joes. People were beginning to be interested in film. Then in 1993 the Film Board was re-established. So people who had started making shorts had a place to go. There was a possibility of getting funding. I ended up producing first films for a lot of my friends, beginning with Ailsa which Paddy Breathnach directed from a story by Joe O'Connor. We produced Gerry Stembridge's Guilttrip, Stephen Barrett's Sweety Barrett and then Kirsten Sheridan's Disco Pigs and John Carney's On The Edge. It was actually easier to get a film made then than it is now. There was a whole curiosity about Ireland, particularly in Europe. The Brits weren't interested. They all thought we were kind of IRA.

The Americans thought we were cute little leprechauns. But the Europeans thought we were Beckett and Joyce."

By then Ed had set up Element Pictures with Andrew Lowe through which he branched into television with John Carney's hit comedy series Bachelor's Walk and executive producer Peter Mullan's The Magdalene Sisters, winner of the Golden Lion at Venice, and Ken Loach's The Wind that Shakes The Barley, winner of the Cannes Palme D'Or. He also produced the award-winning RTE series Pure Mule and Channel 4's Death Of a President.

Meanwhile John Moore, the gaffer from 3 Joes, had moved to Hollywood, where he directed remakes of The Flight of the Phoenix and The Omen.

Ed and Lenny met as schoolboys. "I was dating his sister, " says Ed. "Gonzaga boys were the preferred option for Alexandra girls, " explains Lenny. "I was part of all those parties through my sister. Slightly younger sisters are useful. After that Ed and I lost touch but met up again at Trinity." Their first commission as college video producers was to cover the Trinity Ball. "The only useful thing about it was that with our portable light we helped a girl find her contact lens."

Ed was doing Economic and Social Studies ("for people who didn't really know what they wanted to do"), while Lenny had switched from science to philosophy ("hard-core Anglo-American stuff . . . Derrida, Levinas and other continental philosophers were not regarded as significant"). Lenny's parents are second-generation Jewish immigrants. "My father's side are from Odessa, my mother's from Poland. I talked to some of my elderly relatives before they died and recorded their stories on tape. Any of the family left behind ended up in the camps.

Life stopped. Just like that."

After college he went to Stanford University in California.

When he returned he directed commercials, notably the Carlsberg ad with Jason McAteer dreaming of winning the World Cup. "It couldn't have been further from what I originally was interested in. I don't regret it. In many ways it was really useful to me. But I'd talked with Ed at college about making films together.

He'd gone and produced lots of them. He produced work with people who were my contemporaries and had gone on to make features, and I was sitting at home eating my self alive and writing and throwing stuff away.

That's when my producer Johnny Spears introduced me to Mark O'Halloran."

Spears had seen some of O'Halloran's plays. "The Head of Red O'Brien, or maybe Too Much Of Nothing, " says O'Halloran, who has since scripted Adam & Paul, Garage and Prosperity ("The 3 Joes was before I was born!"). "I think what Johnny saw could have been a monologue about a man whose wife stabbed him in the head and he loses the faculty of language. He's obsessed with The Hunt for Red October. He continues to tell and retell it as it it was the greatest film ever made.

"When Johnny asked if I'd any ideas I told him about a couple of Laurel & Hardy junkies I'd been making notes on. They were both incredibly funny and tragic at the same time. But I didn't know how to turn that into a film . . . Lenny told me to throw the narrative out the window to intensify the focus on the characters. It was a great freeing experience. The characters can do what they like.

It was exciting because I thought nothing like that had been done in Ireland before."

While Ed and Lenny had been making 3 Joes, Mark was coming of age in Amsterdam. "Studying philosophy I was not, " he says. "I went to UCG for five minutes and failed everything. I acted in a few dramas there, but then left and was just drifting. I realised I had to get my life together. I went to the Gaiety School and acted for the next 10 years before writing.

The things I was interested in were things that had never been done in Ireland so it felt they could never be done. I was lucky to meet Lenny because his sensibility was so strongly in the same direction and he allowed me to go there."

Mark grew up in Ennis, eighth in a family of 10. "I think they'd given up when I arrived. It was like, 'aw, raise yerself ''. But with lots of older brothers and sisters, you couldn't really get away with anything. People were looking out for you. My dad was a great storyteller and singer. You'd listen to that. I think families are where storytelling starts. A family tells itself its own stories over and over again. You'd live through an event and then you'd hear the story of the event and it would be different, and then you'd hear it again and it would be different again. I learned that you never let the truth get in the way of a good story."

Mark looks for drama in offbeat things or people he sees on the streets of Dublin, people who don't quite fit in or who are in some way marginalised, what the philosopher Levinas would call 'the other'. His curiosity dovetails with Lenny's fascination with the ability of film to present simple facts or even just the mere passing of time. "Film is the most immediate art in this way. I found it liberating working with Mark because I didn't have to write. I was just able to indulge all my interests in cinema through this amazing writing."

Lenny and Mark's second film Garage has come as an oasis of restraint, a quiet reminder that less is more. Claude Chabrol once said that cinema is about small moments, an insight that triggered the French New Wave. In Garage, Pat Shortt plays against comic type as a simple man in a small midlands town whose only ambition is to fit in but whose otherness makes him an easy scapegoat when anything goes wrong. As with Adam & Paul, nothing much seems to happen.

The truth . . . and the tragedy, but also the humour . . . is in the sensitively observed detail of everyday life. Working from a beautifully pared down script, Abrahamson allows Shortt room to shed his D'Unbelievables persona. He gives a performance of trusting innocence and silent desperation that makes the heart weep. Garage is a coming of age of Irish cinema.

"It's certainly resulted in serious international interest in the next thing the guys want to do, " says Ed. "Whether it turns into carte blanche or not, I don't know. But it's a very open invitation to do whatever they want to do."

Ed is currently producing John Carney's new comedy Zonad, starring Simon Delaney. "It's got a lot of the talent from Bachelor's Walk, but is a very different piece." Inevitably there's great international interest in Zonad as well as following Carney's phenomenal success with his lowbudget musical romance Once.

Although made on a minuscule budget, it has grossed over $10m in the US, prompting a congratulatory call from Steven Spielberg.

Mark sees Prosperity, the drama series made up of four one-hour character studies of people in one way or another left behind by the celtic tiger, as an end of the Adam & Paul line of things. "At the time I wrote it I'd moved from my flat in Parnell Square, so it felt like a closing of a certain kind of creative element in my life. I've written a sitcom series and I'm working on a lot of ideas with Lenny. I've just made a film with Brendan Grant in which I play a filmmaker going to Kosovo to make a film."

Lenny has several projects any one of which may become his next film. He's in Poland with his Polish girlfriend Monika, the country of his mother's roots.

There's a sense of having turned full circle. Like three real-life Joes, Ed and Lenny and Mark have got where they are by following their instinct. "We're back where we started with 3 Joes, " Lenny says. "Our success has given us the freedom to do whatever we want to do next."