There was a time when Ireland had to hang its head in shame among the community of European nations as a country with a capital city that had no concert hall. In that regard, we're still living with the project that was born out of a 1970s decision to find a new home for what was then the ESORTE Symphony Orchestra.

A 900-seat studio home for the orchestra was slightly inflated in scale - inflation, after all, was a basic fact of life in the 1970s - and a 1,200-seater venue was created. Instead of being just the planned home for the RTESO, it was designated the National Concert Hall, in spite of the fact that it was wildly unsuited to the economics of bringing major stars or visiting orchestras, and not even entirely adequate as a home for the orchestra it was allegedly designed for. Now that it's there with the designation National Concert Hall, it's actually the major barrier to a more adequate major musical venue for the capital.

But there's still an area of musical life in which Dublin compares even more poorly with most European capitals. It remains a city without an opera house, and without the sort of opera company you would expect to find in a city of its size and status. With two, nine-day seasons a year, Opera Ireland puts on less work than it did in its former incarnation as the Dublin Grand Opera Society 20 or 30 years ago.

The statistics are interesting in view of the situation in Wales, where Welsh National Opera is a thriving, full-time company, with its own chorus and orchestra, and an international reputation second to none in these islands.

And yet, the DGOS was founded in 1941, a full five years before its Welsh counterpart. And WNO, like the DGOS, began life as an amateur venture. The Welsh company's first Cardiff season, a week-long run at the Prince of Wales Theatre, included just one professional principal, the tenor Tudor Davies.

What can it have been that led WNO in one direction and DGOS/Opera Ireland in another? Partly, I think, it was a matter of personalities, partly a matter of public funding climate. The ethos of DGOS, and still, sadly, of Opera Ireland, is that of a club. And, as a club, it's there to serve the interests of its members rather than the larger public. So, for instance, Opera Ireland had a real crisis of conscience in the closing years of the 20th century about deciding to put on Strauss's Salome. They weren't sure their audience would like it!

WNO, on the other hand, put on the British premiere of Berg's Lulu, a far more controversial, musically demanding and disturbing work, as long ago as 1971. At that time, as far as I can make out, DGOS still had an embargo on Mozart's Magic Flute, on the basis that a work with Masonic connotations was unsuitable fare for Catholic Ireland. It took the company until 1990 to make the break and present that most popular of Mozart's works.

The personalities in charge of WNO, on the other hand, did not define themselves in a similar clubbish role, with the retention of amateur control as an important element in the structure of the company. They also found themselves in a funding environment where access to opera performance was an issue taken far more seriously by public funding authorities.

And they were clever enough to see that a Welsh opera company could operate successfully outside the confines of the national territory of Wales. WNO is in the interesting position of being the main provider of fullscale touring opera in the south-west of England. So important is this work, that the company actually receives a larger grant from the Arts Council of England than the Welsh Arts Council.

The funding climate for opera in Ireland has never been terribly healthy. Both Opera Ireland and the Wexford Festival operate with ridiculously small Arts Council grants (opera, don't forget, is the most expensive art-form), and with sizeable hidden subsidies from RTE, through the use of the two RTE orchestras. The companies have little influence over this part of their operation, and the subsidy arrangement effectively creates barriers to the formation of an independent opera orchestra, which would greatly increase developmental options for the future.

BUT it is the very name, Welsh National Opera, which gives a real clue as to where the Welsh achievement differs from the Irish. The Welsh company is set up to function and be funded as a national company. An opera sub-committee was set up by the Arts Council in Dublin to look into this sort of development here in the 1970s. People who remember the period tell me that a recommendation for a national company was made.

But with the Wexford Festival's founder, Dr Tom Walsh, on the committee, there was an atmosphere of suspicion from both Wexford (that he'd sold out to Dublin), and in the DGOS (that it was really a well-disguised Wexford take-over). The proposed initial level of funding was inflated to the point where the proposal could no longer be seriously considered.

The Arts Council of Northern Ireland's proposal to look into the establishment of an all-Ireland opera company, made in the autumn of last year, looked like the first opportunity in a long time to begin the creation of a serious, full-time opera company on this island. The promised co-operation between the arts councils in Dublin and Belfast on this investigation has since broken down, and factional interests are yet again in control.

The visit to Belfast of the Welsh National Opera company should provide a timely reminder of what has been frittered away by arts councils and opera companies here in the past. Ironically, WNO is here to breach the gap created when ACNI stopped funding Opera Northern Ireland. Let's hope that the flavour of Welsh success will concentrate a few minds here, and get the serious business of a full-time national opera company (all-Ireland or no) back on the agenda. The Arts Council in Dublin has never been as well-funded as it is now. And would you believe it, the idea or aspiration of a national opera company doesn't even merit a passing mention in the new Arts Plan. There's a lot of ground-work yet to be done.

WNO's Rigoletto and Don Giovanni are at the Grand Opera House in Belfast from Tuesday, November 9th to Friday 12th.