Ulster history, over the past 400 years, has a nasty habit of chiming loudly with the present day, and since the outbreak of the present Troubles, any nationalist perspective on it becomes instantly controversial, even in the supposed thaw of the peace process.

Certainly, the outspokenly nationalist West Belfast Festival has always met with controversy. This year's began with Sinead O'Connor's proposal to host onstage a delegation from FAIT (Families Against Intimidation and Terror) - an organisation regarded as deeply suspect in nationalist West Belfast. That gig is now cancelled.

Another unseemly row has broken out between the Northern Irish Arts Council on one side, and DubbelJoint and the local West Belfast community theatre group, JustUs, on the other. Last week, the arts council announced that an £18,000 tranche of DubbelJoint's £62,500 annual revenue funding for 1999 will not now be directed towards the new show, Forced Upon Us.

According to the council, the script "fell below the artistic standards the council expects from its clients". The announcement was made just a week before tomorrow night's gala press opening.

Its Yorkshire-born director, Pam Brighton, who has worked with such left-leaning companies as 7:84 and the Half Moon in London, has also championed the work of working-class Protestant playwright, Gary Mitchell, for BBC radio.

As director of DubbelJoint, Brighton's first collaboration with JustUs was Just a Prisoner's Wife three years ago, which won the Belfast City Council Award for Best Arts Partnership. Another huge success, Binlids, followed - which, for all its republican trappings, and re-enactments of the nearby Springhill and Ballymurphy massacres in the 1970s, was a deeply moving piece which toured to great acclaim in the US.

However, critics closer to home howled it down as republican propaganda, particularly over a widely reported Guests of the Nation-style scene, in which a callow, naive young British soldier is captured and shot by IRA men. "That scene was actually incredibly sympathetic to the soldier," says Brighton, and JustUs writer/actress Brenda Murphy comments, "In fact, it showed that the IRA could be brutal - if anything, it was an anti-IRA scene." However some critics were outraged that a minority element in the audience in Belfast cheered at the re-enacted murder - even though the play also contained explicit criticism of the grip of the IRA's war mentality in nationalist enclaves.

The truth behind this recent row with the arts council lies somewhere in the correspondence between the council and the company. Certainly DubbelJoint had extreme administration problems earlier this year, which were aggravated by moving into its new premises in the BIFHE building on the Whiterock Road. Two conflicting sequences of events come from Pam Brighton and arts council drama and dance officer, Imelda Foley. The paper trail is now before solicitors working on behalf of each camp.

However, Arts Council director, Brian Ferran faxed me a Private Eye (July 9th, 1999) article ridiculing the Arts Council for providing funding for DubbelJoint/ JustUs and the West Belfast festival. The Private Eye article is itself now the subject of legal proceedings.

Neither Ferran nor Foley would name the three external assessors who read the incomplete script for Forced Upon Us, but Ferran told me the script had been "deemed deficient in three main ways. Its characters were wooden - `cardboard' I believe was the word used. It was also deficient in structure, and the quality of the writing was as bad as anything the assessors had ever read." ol O Muiri for this newspaper last week - describing David Trimble as "that ginger wee shithawk" - was not in the run-through I saw last Friday. Forced Upon Us is classic, left-wing, agit-prop theatre - told sharply from the point of view of a marginalised and brutalised Catholic underclass in North-East Ulster in the period from 1912 to the foundation of the one-party State of Northern Ireland and the RUC in 1922. The re-enacted incidents and proclamatory (verbatim) speeches of the time sketch a clear line from the mass signing of the Ulster Covenant, through the arming of the UVF - many of whom joined the B Specials (some of whom allegedly acted in consort with the reprisal squads within the RIC); and the eventual formation of the new Royal Ulster Constabulary in 1922.

The controversial raw style of the JustUs company hits you in the teeth from the start. A young Catholic woman shrieks down the ramp chased by a Protestant workman who rapes her and this is followed by the burning alive of a Catholic shipyard workman by a gang of Protestants, after the sinking of the Titanic.

There are several discharges of a replica gun firing blanks that will lift you six inches out of your seat, although there are also more reasoned criticisms of Unionist abuses of the electoral system. One of the strongest scenes is that of Home Rule MP Joe Devlin, whose humanitarian utterances were roared down in Parliament by assorted Unionist MPs.

The stridency of the production is disturbing, but it is the product of extensive research, mostly carried out by writer Brenda Murphy, in the Northern Ireland Public Record Office, the National Archives in Dublin, and the private files of local West Belfast man Arthur Fegan, who was mutilated in a loyalist pub bombing some years ago. Another source is a Capuchin document unearthed in the Linenhall library, written by a Catholic cleric who signed himself "Ultach", on the frightening experience of Catholics in West Belfast in the 1920s. Even through the lens of 70-odd years, it is deeply shocking material.

"It is crucial that this history is looked at squarely," says Brighton. "You've got to have an analysis into why and how this State began, because the only way you can understand why people act the way they do and are who they are, is by understanding what they've experienced. There is a genuine desire for peace here, and nobody remotely wants a repeat of the last 30 years.

"We looked through all the Craig and Carson letters and speeches, everything they said and wrote, publicly or even privately in diaries, yet at no point did they ask `What are we going to do about the fact that 24 per cent of the population in the Six Counties are Catholic?' There was never a glimmer of a sense that the Catholics even existed, or that maybe we're alienating them or creating hostility, it was quite extraordinary."

Although IRA murders of policemen of the time do not feature heavily in the play, specific security force atrocities are dramatised, including a reprisal massacre in Desertmartin, Co Derry in May 1922, when seven Catholics were shot and beaten to death in front of their Catholic neighbours and relatives, who were then expelled from the village.

A key character is RIC Detective Inspector John W. Nixon (1880-1949), who is alleged (in affidavits of the time) to have led reprisal murder squads into Catholic streets, killing Catholic men, women and children.

Nixon, who became a loyalist folk hero, is most extensively documented in Michael Farrell's 1983 book, Arming the Protestants. One 1922 inquiry into his activities, which found RIC members guilt of murder, was quashed. Nixon went on to join the RUC in command of C District in Belfast (including the then hardline loyalist Shankill Road), and he became Worshipful Master of the RUC Orange lodge, named after Sir Robert Peel.

Nixon moved in high Unionist circles, and it was only after his contentious high-profile comments at the RUC Orange Lodge AGM of 1924 about an RUC man's right to Orange Lodge membership (a right not enjoyed previously by the RIC), that he was seen as a political embarrassment and dismissed.

Nixon then entered politics and was both Belfast City Councillor and Independent Unionist MP in the Northern Ireland Parliament until his death in 1949, aged 70. Nixon's file in the Northern Ireland Public Record Office (NIPRO) was seen in the early 1970s by historian Patrick Buckland - who remarked that it "provides a sad commentary on the government's toleration of Protestant extremism". Yet after Direct Rule, it has remained closed to later historians, and indeed to Brenda Murphy, who requested it by phone.

However, she accepts that there was a mix-up in file numbers and the statement of Aileen McClintock, head of access at NIPRO, assures me that the file has been open since 1994, after having been reviewed in the context of the Conservative government White Paper on Open Government of 1993.

Murphy, a 45-year-old writer and actress, was caught up in the height of the Troubles in 1972, when she was only 17. Like many internees of the time, she endured beatings in Castlereagh, and later gave birth to her daughter in Maghaberry Women's Prison in Armagh. A tiny, doughty, humorous woman, she remains true to her experience, yet is wide open to debate, and utterly committed to the peace process.

Although her Forced Upon Us script highlights axiomatic racism against Catholics in loyalist circles, Pam Brighton says: "We also try to show up sympathetically that there was a very real progressive element within the Protestant working class, of socialist trade unionists who were as screwed by the one-party state as anybody else. If you weren't a member of an Orange Lodge, life could be very difficult, and Protestants had to go along with it."

If reasonable debate is possible about the issues raised in Forced Upon Us, a key dilemma remains the issue of policing of nationalist areas by an armed RUC force. Nearly every fifth wall in nationalist West Belfast is emblazoned with "Disband the RUC", and in the time-honoured tradition of RUC not going into nationalist enclaves, the West Belfast Festival is policed more comfortably by private security rather than RUC.

Forced Upon Us makes no bones about cutting to the historical quick of this issue, but does not offer any real solution. After this fresh controversy with the arts council and DubbelJoint/JustUs are assured of a large and sympathetic local audience. But it will be more interesting to gauge the reaction of people they have invited along from the other side of the "peace wall", such as the Shankill Women's Centre and other community groups, and indeed Billy Hutchinson and David Ervine.

Forced Upon Us runs at the BIFHE Centre, Whiterock Road, Belfast, from tomorrow until August 7th (excluding Sunday)

JustUs also performs A Mother's Heart by Pearse Elliott at the Golden Thread Theatre at the Ardoyne Fleadh