It may seem a ridiculous question, but will Irish politics ever give rise to a bit of decent drama? By drama I don't mean political satire, which has had and continues to have its own well-chronicled problems in this country, but plays, TV films and movies.
Two programmes on RTÉ this week served to illustrate the difficulties. In The Abbey Theatre - The First 100 Years, the Abbey's artistic director, Ben Barnes, cited the hostile reaction to Sebastian Barry's play, Hinterland, based loosely on Charles Haughey, as evidence of the problems the Abbey faced when attempting to do what it was always being urged to do: "taking on subjects of today". Meanwhile, the first episode of the new drama series, Proof, introduced viewers to an opposition politician who clearly is going to turn out to be up to no good in future instalments.
The politician is played by Bryan Murray, whose two most memorable previous TV performances have been as Flurry Knox in The Irish R.M. and murdered wife-batterer Trevor Jordache in Brookside. Well-informed rumour has it that in earlier drafts of the script, Murray's character was a Fianna Fáil taoiseach. However, in the finished drama, he's the leader of the opposition "Social Democrats", which raises some interesting questions about self-censorship.
While I'll leave consideration of Proof's strengths or failings to the tender mercies of our TV critic (Weekend 18), the series does raise the vexed question of the representation of Irish politics and political issues through drama, both on stage and especially on screen. Our close neighbours across the water have consistently found interesting ways of representing their political system in this way, from A Very British Coup, in which a left-wing Labour prime minister (the late Ray McAnally, who would have made a terrific Charles Haughey) is deposed by the conservative establishment, through to last year's The Deal, with its forensic dissection of the relationship between the two most powerful British politicians of their generation, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Coming up soon is The Alan Clark Diaries, with John Hurt as the late and very colourful Tory MP - all imaginative, close-to-the-bone explorations of real political issues through the medium of drama.
In contrast, we must make do with the Jerry Bruckheimer version of our politics.
In last year's Veronica Guerin movie, Irish cinemagoers scratched their heads, wondering where that film had found its plummy-voiced, tie-wearing Tony Gregory, who managed to rewrite the Constitution with a stroke of the pen while accepting the rapturous applause of the entire Oireachtas. Such dramatic licence is only to be expected in Disney-fied versions of recent Irish history (many moons ago, the Comic Strip team did a perfect spoof of the species in Strike, with "Al Pacino" playing Arthur Scargill as a motorbiking action hero). The lesson is clear: all politics is local, and all political drama should be too. But where should we get our source material?
Unfortunately, the Irish political scene has yet to produce so spectacularly indiscreet (and conveniently dead) a figure as Alan Clark. And most of the interesting material from the last few decades of our own political history looks set to remain sub judice until we've all joined Clark on the other side. But it's still rather depressing that this culture seems incapable of exploring through drama and fiction so many of the issues which have convulsed and transformed it in recent years.
For Ben Barnes, it seems, the rejection of Hinterland was a rejection of drama which engaged with contemporary realities. Audiences might beg to differ, and some might argue that contemporary realities are better dealt with through "pure" drama, as opposed to some hybrid form of fact and fiction. But, on screen at least, Ireland has been if anything overburdened with biographical dramas: five different actors in five different dramas have played one relatively minor Dublin criminal, Martin Cahill.
As a nation we seem particularly sensitive about our representation on screen. In the early 1990s, residents of Ballymun objected to the "depiction" of their area in Roddy Doyle's TV series, Family (even though Ballymun was never mentioned by name in the series). Last year, there were complaints about the film Song For a Raggy Boy, set in an industrial school in Cork, because no such institution ever existed in Cork. Such objections highlight the particular sensitivities which arise, especially in a small country, when the boundaries are blurred between fact and fiction, current affairs and drama. Those difficulties are multiplied when our politicians and, inevitably, their learned friends become involved. No wonder, then, that of the hundreds of Irish movies and TV series made in the last 15 years, hardly one has dealt with political corruption or the mechanisms of power.
As a result, the most successful political drama of the last few years is not a drama at all. The Tribunal Show, consisting of transcripts read verbatim from the various tribunals of inquiry, has provided gainful employment for two hard-working actors on radio and at venues around the country for several years now. Which only goes to prove the truth of the old adage so often applied to the Irish political scene: you couldn't make it up. And, it seems, you still can't.