THE past week has been like several weeks in recent years, remarkable for the high profile achieved by Irish culture abroad. The "Ireland and its Diaspora Festival" at the Frankfurt Book Fair, which opened last Tuesday, has already made a big impact, if the extensive and positive response in the German media is an accurate barometer.

The series of readings by Irish writers at the fair itself, coupled with a programme of Irish arts events all over Germany until December, will undoubtedly expand the already extensive cultural territory occupied by Ireland in German hearts and minds. Irish publishers, present at the fair in greater numbers this year, should make substantial gains, although this remains to be seen.

Meanwhile, the top prize at San Sebastian Film Festival for Billy Roche's Trojan Eddie (the second such Irish win in three years) and a Booker Prize nomination for Seamus Deane's first novel, Reading in the Dark, have been added to a national mantelpiece already stacked with glittering prizes bearing evocative names such as Nobel, Oscar, Tony, Grammy and Golden Lion.

There are, however, several risks inherent in this apparently happy situation. The composer Raymond Deane recently warned readers of this newspaper that we are in danger of uncritically accepting the hyperbolic razzmatazz which inevitably accompanies such exposure and neglecting new work of real genius because of its often difficult and, initially at least, unpopular nature.

The other side of this coin is the danger that we will begin to take such international success for granted and become blase about achievements we should cherish.

The day an Irish Booker nomination fails to make the front pages, due to some sort of award fatigue will also be a bad day for Irish culture.

Perhaps the most serious risk, however, is the persistence, despite much political rhetoric to the contrary, of organisational and funding shortfalls in the cultural area, which would not be acceptable in other sectors and which regularly cause us to dance on the edge of disaster.

The Frankfurt festival, as everyone who has had anything to do with it knows full well, was a text book case in point. Funding for the event was so low that, several times last spring, it appeared that it was not going to happen at all. Given that the honour of being offered the showcase position at Frankfurt had been publicly accepted, the embarrassment of failing to take it up scarcely bears thinking about, particularly since it would have occurred bang in the middle of the Irish Presidency of the EU.

THIS might seem like a carping point, since the festival is not only taking place but is, in many respects, showing us in a good light. Unfortunately, however, the kind of frantic ad hocery which occurred behind the scenes before this festival is only too typical of the way we still put such events together.

Furthermore, this protracted and contentious funding crisis led to a great deal of last minute planning, particularly with regard to the exhibition which is the centrepiece of the Irish pavilion. It is here that the real cost of penny pinching in cultural budgets becomes glaringly apparent.

The curator of this exhibition, Luke Dodd, architect Orna Hanly and literary adviser Declan Kiberd are all well respected professionals in their fields, and expectations were understandably high. Here was an opportunity to boldly redefine Ireland for an international audience, to passionately celebrate our creativity while challenging stereotypes.

Stereotypes, indeed, were all too evident at the Frankfurt Book Fair. When Macnas's Gulliver momentarily stumbled from his moorings outside the pavilion, a German passerby immediately exclaimed: "You see, he is drunken on that Irish whiskey. " More seriously, a German magazine supplement on Ireland was illustrated entirely by photographs of empty landscapes.

While Luke Dodd's exhibition was not guilty of reinforcing these hackneyed images, its enforced modesty meant that it could not do much to redirect the visitor to the Irelands (and the diasporas) so powerfully in our literature. At first sight - which is as much as a show like this can reasonably expect it was a rather random scattering of exhibits.

Some of them seemed straightforward and conventional, though rather thin on information - reproduction panels from the Book of Kells, for example. Others seemed wilfully obscure - a large central plinth displayed only a huge 19th century volume with a space hacked out of it for hiding unspecified objects. "I would have liked more information" was a fairly typical, plaintive response of visitors.

What is enormously frustrating about this is that the show was in fact informed by a subtle intelligence which offered suggestive surprises to visitors with the background knowledge - and the time to tease them out. Juxtaposing the legally binding Irish language version of de Valera's Constitution (based on the less authoritative original English text) with Brian Friel's play Translations certainly offers food for thought.

DODD himself describes the show as "minimalist". He was clearly constrained by the lateness of his appointment (last May) and an inadequate budget and space, both of which, unbelievably enough, were steadily further reduced as the date of the opening approached.

These problems go some way to explain the obscene absence of any exhibit relating to publishing in the new technologies, an extraordinary gap in a year when audio visual publishing is being highlighted at the fair.

"Under the circumstances they did well" was a kind of defensive mantra repeated by a number of people who knew the background to the project.

The point, of course, is that the circumstances were simply not good enough and an opportunity to distinguish ourselves became an exercise in making it all right on the night.

What is puzzling about the persistence of these familiar vices of Irish cultural planning is that they are. at long last, fully acknowledged - on paper - by both of the ministries responsible, Arts and Culture and Foreign Affairs. Dick Spring's White Paper on Foreign Policy, published earlier this year, includes an enlightened chapter on cultural relations.

"Ireland's cultural reputation", it states, "constitutes an important national strength and opens the door to many opportunities which not only benefit the arts but the country as a whole. Such opportunities include the possibility for development in the intellectual/information industry areas, cultural tourism and the attraction of business ... a store of goodwill which awaits full exploitation."

The paper concedes, with masterful understatement, that the budget for this significant task (£400,000 annually to the Cultural Relations Committee) is "a modest amount" and promises "to undertake a review of funding devoted to this area". It also commits Foreign Affairs to initiating a debate with Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht, the Arts Council and Bord Trachtala on the structuring of an independent agency to promote Irish culture abroad. Such an agency was endorsed by the Government in The Arts Plan 1995-1997, prepared by the Arts Council at the request of Arts Minister Michael D. Higgins.

Despite these fine intentions, Foreign Affairs only sanctioned a paltry £20,000 to the Frankfurt Festival. Arts and Culture coughed up £50,000 and the hardpressed Arts Council came up with £180,000, a sum which some councillors believe was badly needed for the council's commitments at home. The minimal balance of £1 million was made up with major contributions from Bord Failte, Bord Trachtala and, at the last fence, by heroic work with private sponsors at home (especially Guinness and Jefferson Smurfit) and in Germany, where goodwill towards Ireland produced some remarkable deals.

The fact that the Frankfurt festival dragged itself back from the brink by its fingernails should not absolve these two departments from putting in place, right now, the mechanisms which could protect against such desperate measures and missed opportunities in future. This Government recognises that our cultural profile is one of our strengths. It should give the people working in this field the resources - quite marginal in overall budgetary terms to play to those strengths in a fully professional manner.