We take for granted our cultural self-image, but much of what we claim credit for has occurred in spite of us, writes Fintan O'Toole

In the second series of The Sopranos, Tony's nephew Christopher has a near-death experience after he is shot by two dumb punks. When he comes out of his coma, he tells the family that he has been briefly in Hell. It is, it turns out, an Irish bar where it is always Saint Patrick's Day. The Italians have to play cards and the Irish guys always win.

From the outside, Irish culture must look a bit like that bar where's it's always Saint Patrick's Day. For all that we like to whinge about our marginal position in the world, Ireland occupies, in cultural terms, a position of great privilege. It belongs to the dominant Anglophone mainstream, but still retains an aura of the authentic and the exotic. It can draw on an enormous reservoir of goodwill.

Last summer, for example, the conference of the International Association for the Study of Irish Literature was held in São Paulo. Irish writers and scholars were listened to with great respect by people from around the world and by sympathetic, astonishingly well-informed locals. Would a conference in Dublin on Brazilian culture be so well attended? How many Irish intellectuals know, or care about São Paulo, whose population exceeds that of the entire island of Ireland? Ireland operates, in other words, a huge cultural trade surplus. We have come to take for granted our self-image as a nation of high cultural achievement. Because that image is continually re-enforced by the generous praise of outsiders, it has become part of what we are. Whatever else we get wrong, we can give ourselves high marks for artistic merit.

In pubs with names like Joxer Daly's, images of Behan, Kavanagh, O'Casey, even Beckett adorn the walls. Writers' faces decorate t-shirts. Sligo markets itself to tourists as Yeats County. Summer schools have developed a niche market. Presidents and ambassadors name-check Joyce and Heaney in their speeches. Irish music, theatre and heritage institutions are used to lure visitors. Every artistic success with the slightest Irish connection (Daniel Day Lewis's Oscar nomination for The Gangs of New York, for example) is seized on as proof of our cultural vibrancy.

The awkward reality is that much of the greatness for which we claim credit has happened in spite of us. Most of the great Irish writers and dramatists, from Farquhar and Goldsmith to Joyce and Beckett, got the Hell out of the place. Some of the grand figures of contemporary literature - John McGahern and Edna O'Brien, for example - suffered censorship, neglect and even downright persecution. And, though the climate has changed, the weaknesses of the cultural infrastructure are still almost as glaring as the strengths of individual artists. The Irish publishing industry, for all its progress, is still very much in the shadow of London.

The audio-visual sector remains weak: the triumphs of a Neil Jordan or a Jim Sheridan can't hide the reality that we have neither a thriving indigenous film industry nor an ability to produce television drama with an international appeal. The great Irish rock renaissance that was supposed to follow the phenomenal breakthrough of U2 has turned into a teen idol production line whose products have the shelf life of unpasteurised milk.

Twenty-five years ago, it did not seem insane to think that Irish traditional music, then undergoing a boom, might give birth to a new indigenous modern form, in the way that the blues gave birth to jazz. Yet while the tradition does now contain a number of certifiable geniuses - Martin Hayes, Iarla Ó Lionard and Tony McMahon, for example - this hasn't happened. Indeed, the drift has gone the other way, with great traditional singers such as Dolores Keane, Paul Brady and Mary Black finding it much easier to make a living with mainstream easy-listening music.

Even where there are obvious strengths, it is by no means clear that the society as a whole, through its formal institutions, can take a great deal of credit for them.

Martin Hayes's sublime fusion of Seattle, where he is based, and Co Clare, where he comes from, does not, to put it mildly, owe much to Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann. Most of our best young classical musicians still have to struggle to get the money to study abroad.

The flourishing of the Irish novel in the last decade has certainly been helped by the Arts Council, but is mostly due to the combination of individual Irish talents and London literary agents. It is not even true that Ireland is an especially nice place for every kind of artist to work. A good example is the career of theatre director Joe Dowling, who is now the artistic director of the Tyrone Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis. He spent a decade running the Abbey, to which he has just returned briefly to direct the current production of All My Sons.

At the Guthrie, Dowling is adored, and his board gives him a budget of $40 million a year. His standing in the city is extremely high and the main concern is how to hold on to him. The state of Minnesota and the local business community is raising a fortune to build a fabulous new theatre for him.

At the Abbey, if Dowling were still there, he would have not much more than a tenth of his Guthrie budget. But he's not still there, because he was driven out by internal Abbey machinations. Given a choice between opulence and adoration in Minneapolis and penury and petty politics in Dublin, the attractions of Ireland's great cultural environment are not entirely obvious.

None of this is to suggest that support for the arts in Ireland has not improved almost beyond recognition. What needs to be remembered, however, is that what has been improved upon was an astonishingly poor level of cultural provision.

Thirty years ago, the Republic had just eight purpose-built theatres, and one of those - the Olympia in Dublin - was closed because it was literally falling apart. North of a line drawn between Galway and Dublin, there was precisely one theatre in which a professional English-language play could be staged : the Town Hall Theatre in Dundalk.

There was no national concert hall - the RTÉ Symphony Orchestra (as it then was) was based at the Saint Francis Xavier Hall.

There was no national museum of modern art - the Royal Hospital in Kilmainham, where the IMMA is now housed, was empty and derelict. The National College of Art and Design had very few qualified teachers and was in a state of permanent crisis. There was no gallery capable of hosting large visiting international exhibitions. The National Museum was widely regarded as a hopelessly inadequate institution. The National Library lacked even the funding to catalogue its holdings.

The level of State funding was abysmal. The Arts Council's entire budget was £100,000. Even when institutions like the Abbey, the Gate, the Irish Ballet Company and the Dublin Theatre Festival (all then funded directly by government) are included, the total was less than £600,000. The biggest single recipient of State money, the Abbey, got £290,000. Most professional artists, even famous ones, existed in a state of semi-permanent penury. Compared with this almost token provision, the situation now is transformed. A combination of EU Structural Funds and the economic boom of the 1990s has created a decent basic cultural infrastructure.

Most major towns and most of Dublin's new suburbs have a theatre which may or may not also function as a gallery or arts centre. A city like Galway, which had no professional theatre company and no English-language theatre space, now has Druid, the Town Hall Theatre and the Black Box. New institutions like IMMA and the Irish Film Centre have taken their place alongside the refurbished and extended National Gallery, National Museum and Chester Beatty Library.

The Arts Council's grant in 2003 is €44 million, 87% coming from the exchequer with the balance from the National Lottery. Over 500 arts organisations get some State funding and the same number of individual artists get some kind of bursary every year. The establishment of Aosdána, which is also funded by the Arts Council, has virtually eliminated the risk of dire poverty at least for established artists.

Yet all of this huge increase in public support is somewhat deceptive. In the first place, it has merely brought Ireland to a point where it is no longer a laughing stock by normal European standards. At the same time, the surge of physical development has in fact created a whole new set of problems.

That €44 million may be a lot of money, but in the context of public spending as a whole, it is not significant.

To put it in context, the State is planning to spend €300 million simply buying the land for a 10-kilometre stretch of the M50 motorway. And the spending on arts is patently inadequate. According to the Government-approved Arts Plan, itself a prudent and reasonably cautious document, this year's spending ought to be almost €54 million.

The rapid and impressive development of a cultural infrastructure, meanwhile, has created a hugely increased level of demand for these very modest funds. The capital spending for new theatres and arts centres around the country was relatively easy in boom times, especially since much of the money came from Brussels.

But these buildings have to be managed and supplied with artistic product to serve their audiences. The State has made little provision for this. The Arts Council's funding has not increased to take account of the new diversity of venues.

Leaving aside the big national institutions, a typical venue in regional Ireland - the Cork Opera House, the Letterkenny Arts Centre, the Civic Theatre in Tallaght and so on - is expected to function this year on a grant of between €100,000 and €200,000.

Major production companies with international reputations also operate on very small grants (Druid gets €475,000; the Gate €600,000) and are not in a position to subsidise other venues by touring expensive shows. The result, inevitably, is that local venues are often in a position neither to generate their own shows nor to take risks with material that doesn't stand a decent chance of paying its way.

There is thus a real danger that the arts in Ireland are beginning to occupy a never-never land. The old reckless and occasionally magnificent individualism that was forced on artists by a climate of hostility or neglect is gone.

Most artists now have formal training and expect to make a decent living. The endless celebration of "our" cultural achievements leads them to expect that society and the State have a real commitment to artistic excellence. Yet it is not at all clear that the State is currently capable of fulfilling those expectations.

The fact that the arts budget was among the first to be cut at the first sign of an economic downturn is hardly encouraging. The Government clearly believes that, for all the talk of the "arts sector" as a significant constituency, the general public really doesn't care. Or perhaps that the public thinks Irish culture is thriving so long as U2 get an Oscar nomination and the Taoiseach's daughter gets a fabulous book advance.

So, as strategies for Irish art in the 21st century, silence, cunning and exile are gone. And appreciation, enthusiasm and acceptance haven't really arrived to take their place. The result is certainly not Hell, but perhaps a kind of limbo where the endless celebration of Saint Patrick's Day may eventually become rather tiresome.

Tomorrow: Michael Dervan on how the Celtic tiger passed classical music by

Wednesday: Hugh Linehan asks if Irish film-making has lived up to its early promise

Thursday: Aidan Dunne on the coming of age of the

visual arts in Ireland

Friday: Karen Fricker on how a changing Ireland is changing Irish theatre

In the second series of The Sopranos, Tony's nephew Christopher has a near-death experience after he is shot by two dumb punks. When he comes out of his coma, he tells the family that he has been briefly in Hell. It is, it turns out, an Irish bar where it is always Saint Patrick's Day. The Italians have to play cards and the Irish guys always win.

From the outside, Irish culture must look a bit like that bar where's it's always Saint Patrick's Day. For all that we like to whinge about our marginal position in the world, Ireland occupies, in cultural terms, a position of great privilege. It belongs to the dominant Anglophone mainstream, but still retains an aura of the authentic and the exotic. It can draw on an enormous reservoir of goodwill.

Last summer, for example, the conference of the International Association for the Study of Irish Literature was held in São Paulo. Irish writers and scholars were listened to with great respect by people from around the world and by sympathetic, astonishingly well-informed locals. Would a conference in Dublin on Brazilian culture be so well attended? How many Irish intellectuals know, or care about São Paulo, whose population exceeds that of the entire island of Ireland? Ireland operates, in other words, a huge cultural trade surplus. We have come to take for granted our self-image as a nation of high cultural achievement. Because that image is continually re-enforced by the generous praise of outsiders, it has become part of what we are. Whatever else we get wrong, we can give ourselves high marks for artistic merit.

In pubs with names like Joxer Daly's, images of Behan, Kavanagh, O'Casey, even Beckett adorn the walls. Writers' faces decorate t-shirts. Sligo markets itself to tourists as Yeats County. Summer schools have developed a niche market. Presidents and ambassadors name-check Joyce and Heaney in their speeches. Irish music, theatre and heritage institutions are used to lure visitors. Every artistic success with the slightest Irish connection (Daniel Day Lewis's Oscar nomination for The Gangs of New York, for example) is seized on as proof of our cultural vibrancy.

The awkward reality is that much of the greatness for which we claim credit has happened in spite of us. Most of the great Irish writers and dramatists, from Farquhar and Goldsmith to Joyce and Beckett, got the Hell out of the place. Some of the grand figures of contemporary literature - John McGahern and Edna O'Brien, for example - suffered censorship, neglect and even downright persecution. And, though the climate has changed, the weaknesses of the cultural infrastructure are still almost as glaring as the strengths of individual artists. The Irish publishing industry, for all its progress, is still very much in the shadow of London.

The audio-visual sector remains weak: the triumphs of a Neil Jordan or a Jim Sheridan can't hide the reality that we have neither a thriving indigenous film industry nor an ability to produce television drama with an international appeal. The great Irish rock renaissance that was supposed to follow the phenomenal breakthrough of U2 has turned into a teen idol production line whose products have the shelf life of unpasteurised milk.

Twenty-five years ago, it did not seem insane to think that Irish traditional music, then undergoing a boom, might give birth to a new indigenous modern form, in the way that the blues gave birth to jazz. Yet while the tradition does now contain a number of certifiable geniuses - Martin Hayes, Iarla Ó Lionard and Tony McMahon, for example - this hasn't happened. Indeed, the drift has gone the other way, with great traditional singers such as Dolores Keane, Paul Brady and Mary Black finding it much easier to make a living with mainstream easy-listening music.

Even where there are obvious strengths, it is by no means clear that the society as a whole, through its formal institutions, can take a great deal of credit for them.

Martin Hayes's sublime fusion of Seattle, where he is based, and Co Clare, where he comes from, does not, to put it mildly, owe much to Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann. Most of our best young classical musicians still have to struggle to get the money to study abroad.

The flourishing of the Irish novel in the last decade has certainly been helped by the Arts Council, but is mostly due to the combination of individual Irish talents and London literary agents. It is not even true that Ireland is an especially nice place for every kind of artist to work. A good example is the career of theatre director Joe Dowling, who is now the artistic director of the Tyrone Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis. He spent a decade running the Abbey, to which he has just returned briefly to direct the current production of All My Sons.

At the Guthrie, Dowling is adored, and his board gives him a budget of $40 million a year. His standing in the city is extremely high and the main concern is how to hold on to him. The state of Minnesota and the local business community is raising a fortune to build a fabulous new theatre for him.

At the Abbey, if Dowling were still there, he would have not much more than a tenth of his Guthrie budget. But he's not still there, because he was driven out by internal Abbey machinations. Given a choice between opulence and adoration in Minneapolis and penury and petty politics in Dublin, the attractions of Ireland's great cultural environment are not entirely obvious.

None of this is to suggest that support for the arts in Ireland has not improved almost beyond recognition. What needs to be remembered, however, is that what has been improved upon was an astonishingly poor level of cultural provision.

Thirty years ago, the Republic had just eight purpose-built theatres, and one of those - the Olympia in Dublin - was closed because it was literally falling apart. North of a line drawn between Galway and Dublin, there was precisely one theatre in which a professional English-language play could be staged : the Town Hall Theatre in Dundalk.

There was no national concert hall - the RTÉ Symphony Orchestra (as it then was) was based at the Saint Francis Xavier Hall.

There was no national museum of modern art - the Royal Hospital in Kilmainham, where the IMMA is now housed, was empty and derelict. The National College of Art and Design had very few qualified teachers and was in a state of permanent crisis. There was no gallery capable of hosting large visiting international exhibitions. The National Museum was widely regarded as a hopelessly inadequate institution. The National Library lacked even the funding to catalogue its holdings.

The level of State funding was abysmal. The Arts Council's entire budget was £100,000. Even when institutions like the Abbey, the Gate, the Irish Ballet Company and the Dublin Theatre Festival (all then funded directly by government) are included, the total was less than £600,000. The biggest single recipient of State money, the Abbey, got £290,000. Most professional artists, even famous ones, existed in a state of semi-permanent penury. Compared with this almost token provision, the situation now is transformed. A combination of EU Structural Funds and the economic boom of the 1990s has created a decent basic cultural infrastructure.

Most major towns and most of Dublin's new suburbs have a theatre which may or may not also function as a gallery or arts centre. A city like Galway, which had no professional theatre company and no English-language theatre space, now has Druid, the Town Hall Theatre and the Black Box. New institutions like IMMA and the Irish Film Centre have taken their place alongside the refurbished and extended National Gallery, National Museum and Chester Beatty Library.

The Arts Council's grant in 2003 is €44 million, 87% coming from the exchequer with the balance from the National Lottery. Over 500 arts organisations get some State funding and the same number of individual artists get some kind of bursary every year. The establishment of Aosdána, which is also funded by the Arts Council, has virtually eliminated the risk of dire poverty at least for established artists.

Yet all of this huge increase in public support is somewhat deceptive. In the first place, it has merely brought Ireland to a point where it is no longer a laughing stock by normal European standards. At the same time, the surge of physical development has in fact created a whole new set of problems.

That €44 million may be a lot of money, but in the context of public spending as a whole, it is not significant.

To put it in context, the State is planning to spend €300 million simply buying the land for a 10-kilometre stretch of the M50 motorway. And the spending on arts is patently inadequate. According to the Government-approved Arts Plan, itself a prudent and reasonably cautious document, this year's spending ought to be almost €54 million.

The rapid and impressive development of a cultural infrastructure, meanwhile, has created a hugely increased level of demand for these very modest funds. The capital spending for new theatres and arts centres around the country was relatively easy in boom times, especially since much of the money came from Brussels.

But these buildings have to be managed and supplied with artistic product to serve their audiences. The State has made little provision for this. The Arts Council's funding has not increased to take account of the new diversity of venues.

Leaving aside the big national institutions, a typical venue in regional Ireland - the Cork Opera House, the Letterkenny Arts Centre, the Civic Theatre in Tallaght and so on - is expected to function this year on a grant of between €100,000 and €200,000.

Major production companies with international reputations also operate on very small grants (Druid gets €475,000; the Gate €600,000) and are not in a position to subsidise other venues by touring expensive shows. The result, inevitably, is that local venues are often in a position neither to generate their own shows nor to take risks with material that doesn't stand a decent chance of paying its way.

There is thus a real danger that the arts in Ireland are beginning to occupy a never-never land. The old reckless and occasionally magnificent individualism that was forced on artists by a climate of hostility or neglect is gone.

Most artists now have formal training and expect to make a decent living. The endless celebration of "our" cultural achievements leads them to expect that society and the State have a real commitment to artistic excellence. Yet it is not at all clear that the State is currently capable of fulfilling those expectations.

The fact that the arts budget was among the first to be cut at the first sign of an economic downturn is hardly encouraging. The Government clearly believes that, for all the talk of the "arts sector" as a significant constituency, the general public really doesn't care. Or perhaps that the public thinks Irish culture is thriving so long as U2 get an Oscar nomination and the Taoiseach's daughter gets a fabulous book advance.

So, as strategies for Irish art in the 21st century, silence, cunning and exile are gone. And appreciation, enthusiasm and acceptance haven't really arrived to take their place. The result is certainly not Hell, but perhaps a kind of limbo where the endless celebration of Saint Patrick's Day may eventually become rather tiresome.