David Wheatley, a graduate of Trinity College, founded and edited College Green, a poetry journal, in 1995 and is currently launching a new publication, Meter Magazine in association with Lilliput Press.

"I had a very strong sense of the sort of magazine I wanted to run and while there are lots of magazines in existence in this country, none quite fitted the bill of what I felt a literary magazine should be, so I decided to start one myself.

"Funding College Green involved standing around in lots of grotty cafes and student sandwich bars looking for a £30 ad. As for funding myself, I'm what Beckett called in Murphy a chronic emeritus; I just live on handouts from charitable institutions, hack journalism and anything at all basically.

"I have absolutely no formal training in magazine layout or editing. I picked it up from experimenting and through freelance work. I'm still colossally ignorant but you do just pick it up as you go along.

"There is a definite change in the arts; none of this would have been happening 10 years ago - there are new magazines springing up all over the place, many funded by local authorities. I think certain people have woken up to the commercial possibilities of the arts as a cultural industry.

"I don't know whether I will stay in Ireland. Although this country prides itself on having a very literary culture, there is just no structure or place for a literary journalist to make any real money, so it's not in my best interest commercially to stay here."

Jason Byrne has recently directed Julius Caesar in The Crypt and The Revenger's Tragedy in the Beckett Centre in Trinity College. He is currently at work on Measure for Measure for the Dublin Theatre Festival Fringe.

I only planned to do a workshop presentation of Julius Caesar just certain scenes with friends who were out of work to keep us ticking over. It was a project I wanted to do and didn't have the avenue so I decided to do it myself.

"We haven't got any funding as such. Ideally we'd like Arts Council support in order to pay the actors and ourselves a salary; that's the biggest problem. It's very hard to hang on to people when you're in competition with a wage in a larger theatre.

"I did a two year acting course in Trinity, but directing was more about taking the plunge and learning by default. There aren't really any educational facilities here, either you hitch up to another director to watch and make the coffee or else you take a risk and learn by your mistakes.

"I think young people are increasingly taking things into their own hands, though perhaps this is a double-edged sword. When you've got no money you've got nothing to lose and you put your neck out. I think that's why the bigger theatres are taking less risks, whereas young groups are taking more.

"I'd like to stay on in Ireland because it is very exciting here at the moment, I think there is a boom and people are becoming more interested in the arts. Though perhaps after two years scraping by on the dole I'll just have to get away."

Redmond Cabot, a photographer, was part of a group exhibition in Dublin before taking a solo show to Amsterdam in November 1995.

"I think everyone knows that you're not going to get anywhere in the arts unless you do it yourself. I've been taught in life to do something you enjoy and photography gives me an immense amount of enjoyment. The exhibition was a way of actualising my dreams.

"I've always found the Arts Council very supportive. There is however, a large buffer zone of bureaucracy in order to get through to the funding. I think artists should be given physical space and money for materials so that they can do their work and then after that, access to data-bases, and so on. But first of all give them their materials.

"I work five nights a week in a restaurant, which lets me get up in the morning and buy film to take photographs and develop them, and I don't see any other way round that. I think any artist knows that they're not going to make a living of it for the first while.

"Something special has happened in Dublin since the 1980s and my exhibition in Amsterdam was promoting the idea that Dublin is going through a renaissance. Certainly there is a new confidence in Dublin and it's because young people are realising that Ireland's identity has proven not to be a fixed thing but plural, which in turn has promoted a great exuberance.

"I feel rooted in Ireland, but I don't feel rooted in any one tradition. My plan is to be based in Ireland and acknowledge those roots but to be wider and more international in outlook. As to whether it will be possible financially, I really don't know."

Paul O'Connor is founder and administrator of the Bridges and Crossroads project which consists of an exhibition (autumn 1995), book and video of artists responding to poetry.

"Starting the project was a whim more than anything else. Maybe at a subconscious level I felt that on finishing college there was going to be nothing for me, so I had to get out there and do something that would establish me as being employable.

"I had no training whatsoever in arts administration; the only thing I had organised before that exhibition was a pub quiz, but I felt an urge to do something, to see could I pull it off. Then I had to really wake up to reality, when I started to put it into place and start learning on my feet.

"The Arts Council was very encouraging and helpful, in as much as they could be in other ways. Although we got the maximum grant it didn't cover a half or even a third of the expenses, so we had to go looking for other sources of funding.

"We went on a major campaign for commercial funding but companies were not forthcoming about helping us as they had commitments in other areas. So at the end of the day I footed most of the bill myself. I now feel that unless you're really driven to organise the project then you're probably wise to pull out or suggest the idea to some other body.

"I do think there are a lot of things happening in Ireland that are very new but I wonder is it any different to a generation ago? After all, young groups of like-minded people have always been getting together and organising new journals or starting theatre groups.

"If I got a decent job in the arts, I would love to stay here, but having organised the exhibition and seen how little commercial interest in the arts and even how little in-depth media coverage there is, I know there just is not a living to be made."