OF course, I say to Ciaran McMenamin, when it comes to writing a novel actors probably have an inbuilt advantage in coming up with dialogue, don’t they? If you know how to read lines shouldn’t you know how to write them?

“No,” he replies laughing, “I don’t think so. I know plenty of actors who can barely speak dialogue.”

You will know the face. Ciaran McMenamin has been a regular on our screens since the end of the 1990s. You may have seen him in everything from Rab C Nesbitt to Midsomer Murders, from David Copperfield to Primeval; good-looking, impish, Northern Irish.

Now, at the age of 41, he has branched out into novel-writing (and, yes, he can do dialogue. In fact he does it very well). Skintown, his debut, is that rare thing, a comic novel set in Northern Ireland. And in this case there are no quotation marks necessary around the word comic.

It’s a story about being young, about drugs and dance culture, about religion and riots, sectarianism and ceasefires. I like it because it made me laugh, because it mentions my own hometown Coleraine (not in complimentary terms but I’ll not hold that against it) and because it asks the big questions. Such as: “Why do Northern Irish men over 40 all have moustaches?” As McMenamin points out, even on Coronation Street the Northern Irish actor Charlie Lawson sported a tache.

Which raises the question, now he’s in his 40s, how’s his own Zapata coming along? “I have never been tempted to grow a moustache. I’ve had a few sticky-on ones in the day job and I’ve been asked on one production, ‘Why don’t you just grow the moustache?’ But there’s no way on my days off I’m going to the pub with my little ginger moustache. It’s not happening.”

Skintown has already been described as a Northern Irish Trainspotting, though not, it should be clear, by McMenamin himself. “It’s a book about young men and there are drugs in it. The comparisons in a lot of ways stop there, if you ask me.”

To be fair, Skintown has some of the hooligan energy of Welsh’s debut novel (though none of the vernacular bite), but it is its own thing in the end. And what is that? It’s a novel about all the things Northern Irish novels tend to be about, but, more than that, it’s about how sheer youthfulness can sometimes – for a little time – bridge the seismic gaps in a divided culture. It’s also often very funny

And maybe it shares the odd DNA strand with McMenamin’s own life growing up in Enniskillen, County Fermanagh. Yes, he has been to the odd rave in his time. Yes, he still speaks with a strong Northern Irish accent. And yes, he grew up in a country that was for too long in conflict.

Today he is at home in London where he lives with fellow actor Annabel Scholey. He calls her his “missus,” but actually the wedding isn’t until next month. Back in Fermanagh if you must know. And after that he’s hoping they will join the current “arty exodus” out of London and down to Hastings.

McMenamin left Northern Ireland to study acting in Glasgow. “I went to the Royal Scottish Academy, which is now called something w***y, and had an amazing time,” he says. He’s still acting now. He will be seen later this year in a new BBC drama by the Irish playwright Conor McPherson. But for the moment, Skintown is his life. There’s a novel to promote and, as it’s already been bought by a Dublin film company, he’s working on a Skintown screenplay too.

Initially McMenamin sat down to write a short story that he could then turn into a short film. But once he started he found the voice of his main protagonist, Vinny, and he began to enjoy himself. Soon the short story became something bigger. A proper full-on novel, one that is aware of the terror and tragedies his home country has suffered over the last few decades but that also sees the absurdity of that history too.

“All the Northern Irish people I have ever known and still know aren’t particularly bothered about this thing one way or the other. They find it absurd, they find it sad and they’ve got an amazing amount of gallows humour from being brought up in it all.

“The book has become more Northern Irish than I had intended. I thought: ‘I am going to write something about Northern Ireland that’s not about guns and bombs.’ It was important for me that it was about those young people on that night out and I wanted that to have a relevance for any young people from Glasgow, Dublin, Manchester, who have ever been to a rave and got frightened because they are going to take drugs.

“But then naturally all the other stuff’s there because that’s who the writer is.”

Well, indeed. Set in the early 1990s (on the cusp of the first IRA ceasefire), Skintown is a book about a particular place during a particular moment in time. McMenamin grew up in Northern Ireland during the Troubles doing what young men do. He went out, drank a bit, flirted with girls, maybe headed up to Portrush to go to the infamous Kellys nightclub (or Ned’s as it’s called in the book). Life was normal. But then again it wasn’t. All of that filters into Skintown.

Vinny is not McMenamin (as if that needs stating), but there was one incident in the latter’s life that offered a starting point for the book.

“A girl asked me to pretend to be her girlfriend because she needed a lift home and the two chaps [in the car] turned out to be rather scary older gentlemen of the other [religious] persuasion.”

“They were giving it the big lip when we actually crashed the car.” Bizarrely, that shared automotive experience changed everything. The two scary older gentlemen and McMenamin bonded as a result.

“It’s always stuck in my head because it was so blackly funny; a perfect microcosm of Northern Ireland. There’s all that s***e simmering away under the surface but the minute there’s a shared stress you kind of have more in common than anyone else in the world.”

There is another part of Vinny that he will concede is drawn from himself: Vinny’s musical taste. He was more of an indie kid than a raver. “My experiences of Kellys was going to nights where bad local cover bands from Ballymena played The Pixies Doolittle straight through. Those were the nights I personally used to really enjoy.

“But I did end up at a few of these rave nights and I had amazing times and experiences which obviously feed into the way I’ve described that stuff in the book. But I would certainly have been more about six strings than a repetitive beat. And still would be.”

The legend of the rave era is of course the way it brought people together. But in Northern Ireland that was a bigger ask than maybe elsewhere. Even rave culture had its religious divide in the province, one that is reflected in the novel. “I always thought that was an interesting conceit; this notion that these young people are genuinely enamoured of each other but at the start of the night they buy their drugs from their own brand of terrorist.

“It’s just so uniquely Northern Ireland. It’s so much part of the fabric that you do that and you don’t even mention it and then you go out and have a great night’s craic. It’s just always stuck with me as such a horrifyingly bizarre thing.”

But then again when everyone started getting loved up, some of the walls did come tumbling down. “I have a very vivid memory of that happening,” McMenamin agrees. “Now I have discussed this at length with friends at home and different people. There are articles from the early noughties about how that happened.

“Some people will argue that happened, but only in middle-class circles. That could well be true, but I remember dancing round bonfires with men who used to chase me around Enniskillen because I’d had a Protestant girlfriend. That’s a fact and that’s my reality.”

Change is possible. Even in Northern Ireland.

Skintown, by Ciaran McMenamin, is published by Doubleday, £12.99.