`I'm lucky enough that I can get up some mornings and I don't need a drink. In some situations, like this (at the Edinburgh Festival) you can have the thought, I'd like a drink. But there's nothing was as bad as the 20 years of finding yourself in a situation that you were powerless. I managed, through friends, through someone who gave me a gift, to get six weeks of reality therapy at the Rutland Centre. That was a humbling experience. It was a long journey; it was a journey that had taken 20 years. Alcohol is just a symptom. I had to come upon my life as if it were an archaeological site and brush it with small brushes. I had to make it mine, and nobody's going to take it back."

Every show which goes up during the Dublin Theatre Festival is the result of a struggle but surely none has been greater than that of Mannix Flynn to perform his one-man show, Talking To The Wall, at the Temple Bar Music Centre for three nights next week.

It may be on during the festival but it does not belong to it: "There's no point being in the Fringe in the Dublin Theatre Festival," he says. "That's enabling the main festival to do what it does. You're Juno to the Captain." Two former attempts to stage the play, one at the Abbey and the other at the Project, floundered due to disagreements between Flynn and others involved in the productions.

So he made up his mind: "I decided I was going to do it, or die. After working out a lot of my own personal problems, last December, I was ready to do it. I said `okay' and I sat working on it in a room for a few weeks with my partner Susan Bergin, and then I went away for a while and I learned it thoroughly. I went to the Da Club (in Dublin) and I said, `Can I borrow your venue for three nights? I've no money'. The three nights were packed."

After further work, Flynn made a video of the show, which was seen by the comedian, Sean Hughes. He persuaded the Gilded Balloon venue at the Edinburgh Festival to take it and, with director Garret Keogh and designer Perry Ogden, he gathered together the money to go - from sources including "the publicans of Dublin," he says.

The venue was noisy and at first the houses were poor - Flynn lambasted the Edinburgh Festival on television - but the show went on to win rave reviews and a Fringe First Award.

The script, performed with manic energy, has co-ordinates which people will recognise from Flynn's autobiographical work, Nothing To Say: from Borstal to prison to the stage. But Flynn insists "It's not about Mannix Flynn. Mannix Flynn wrote it and Mannix Flynn performs it." It is about the general condition of being trapped by your circumstances, he says.

Why is our literature dominated by tales of emotional brutality experienced by Irish men? "The man is the hunter. Feelings don't come into it. Not when there's poverty - emotional poverty," he explains. But why in Ireland, particularly? "The state handed over the running of the country to the church. Now that's collapsing and, as far as I'm concerned, the whole of Ireland is dysfunctional and should be in therapy."

Talking To The Wall runs at the Temple Bar Music Centre from Monday to Wednesday.