a few years ago I was working in a phone company and hated it, so to relieve the boredom I took a night course at the Gaiety School of Acting. I never really trained properly as an actress, so I've managed to blag my way into the stuff I've done.

Ending up on Becoming Jane was just plain jammy. Anne (Hathaway) was lovely but a lot of the younger British actors were whingeing about what they had or didn't have. I was just happy to be on set, getting picked up in a car from home every morning. Julie Walters on the other hand was so cool and sure of herself, like talking to someone at a bus stop.

the writing has always been going on in the background as I loved writing stories when I was younger. The way Little Gem came about was because I was told to bring along a monologue to an acting audition. Because I'm a lazy cow, I didn't want to have to go to the library to get something, so I worked on my own piece and brought that in.

i come from the northside of Dublin, and I've noticed that when you go to the theatre there are so few working class Dublin women in plays, unless they're hookers or criminals. I still work part-time in a women's health organisation and Little Gem is basically about all the women I've met. They're hard working... not rich, not poor. There's huge number of women in between the 'Irish mammy' and the latte-drinking professional young woman. In the play, the grandmother character Kay goes into Ann Summers to buy a vibrator. These days the grannies have better social lives than the kids.

in terms of writing the characters, Kay came first and was based on all the generations of Dublin women ahead of me. The younger character of Amber came second, and then Lorraine, the mother, was created to bridge the gap. I knew I wanted to write this play before I turned 30, so that I wouldn't be too old to write dialogue for a teenager, so that put a real fire under me.

it's funny; the film or TV world is probably easier to break into than theatre if you're working class. The theatre community here can be a bit elitist. I remember someone saying "it's great that you're writing theatre for yourselves", and they often comment on how non-theatre people are going to the theatre a lot more. I don't know if that's a compliment or not!

i think rtÉ drama gets a lot of flak but seeing as we're a small country with one channel commissioning drama series, I think we're doing well. Pure Mule was the one point where they turned a corner
because it was genuinely home-grown. One day I'd love to write a drama for RTÉ, if there's room for it.

the great thing now is that I've met so many people in the theatre world through this script, and people are eager for me to write more stuff. The doors are open...I just need to walk through them now.

'Little Gem' played at the Dublin Fringe Fest and is showing at the Civic Theatre Tallaght on 27 September