Joe Dowling is back for a stint at the Abbey after seven years at the helm of a leading US theatre. It's given him plenty of ideas about how to support the arts in Ireland. Patsy McGarry reports

Joe Dowling is not convinced. He simply does not believe Ireland regards the arts as a necessity. Looking at the papers, hearing about cuts, he believes that, once again, when the economy tightens it becomes clear that the Government views them as a luxury.

"They are as important as any other sector - as farming, as education, as sport, even as health," he says. "Just think of the power of drama in fulfilling our sense of who we are, not just as consumers but as human beings. As a nation."

The arts are central to understanding what it is to be a civilised human being, he says. "They are as important as hospitals. They are a necessity for the health of the imagination and the spirit of the people."

So does he favour a more de Valera-style view of how things should be, as expressed in that famous 1943 St Patrick's Day speech, of a people "who valued material wealth only as the basis of right living, of a people who were satisfied with frugal comfort and devoted their leisure to the things of the spirit"?

Those people now tend to laugh at such a vision of Ireland, he says, but they shouldn't dismiss it. "There's nothing wrong with rising above the material and the exclusion of greed as the motivating force in our lives."

And yet go abroad, he points out, and you encounter a vision of Ireland as a place where the arts are thriving - a vision promoted by the Government and by tourism agencies. "The reality is very different. And I now see they were even talking about removing tax exemption for artists as well!". It is "way over time for us to stop paying lip service to the notion that we have a vibrant cultural life".

He is in an upstairs rehearsal room at the Abbey. It is lunchtime and the cast of All My Sons, Arthur Miller's play about the second World War, have gone out to have a bite. He talks with the grace of a man who accepts rather than enjoys the publicity cycle that comes with staging a play.

He is intimately familiar with the Abbey. He was its youngest artistic director, from 1978 to 1985. So his views on the building carry authority. They are also unequivocal. Like the Kerryman asked for directions, he wouldn't start from there at all. He would like to see a new Abbey built on the site of the old Carlton cinema on O'Connell Street. It would be "a beautiful centrepiece" for our main thoroughfare. "The Abbey needs to get the building it should've got 35 years ago," he says.

But he knows Ben Barnes, the Abbey's current artistic director, and the board are happy to stay on the existing site, and he can go along with that. But he would like to see the new Abbey face the river.

For him there would be a synergy about that, too. The Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, where he has been artistic director for the past seven years, faces the Mississippi. Not that personal synergy dictates his preference for seeing the Abbey front onto the Liffey. As the centre of theatrical life in the country - "which it is, whether people like it or not" - it should have a significant location.

He hopes the Government will rise to the occasion of its centenary, next year. The Abbey has been reflecting the life of the country since it was founded, in 1904, and although he says he does not believe governments ever deliberately neglected it, neglect it they have.

He loves Minneapolis enormously. It is "a very civilised place to live, with museums, an orchestra, ballet, wonderful theatre. It has a real community", he says. The Guthrie is one of the biggest regional theatres in the US, with 30,000 subscribers and an annual budget of $20 million, or about €19 million. They are planning a new theatre there. It should take three years, and he will remain at least until it is completed. After that? "It's up in the air."

He is also lobbying the newly elected governor of Minnesota, Tim Pawlenty, to help finance the new theatre. Indeed, he is hoping to attract just over a quarter of its funding from the state. Two attempts to win financial support from Pawlenty's predecessor, a wrestler named Jesse Ventura, failed.

Dowling suggests Irish theatres might consider the US subscription model. The Gaiety and the Olympia in Dublin are simply not viable as commercial theatres, he says, but have to subsidise plays with rock concerts. Indeed, he says, commercial theatre is viable nowhere in Ireland.

So why isn't subscription encouraged? In the US, subscribers get tax relief - subsidy by another name. "Why not here?" he asks.

In what may be a novel move, he has brought two American actors to the Abbey from his production of All My Sons at the Guthrie last year. Helen Carey and Peter Michael Goetz are here as part of an exchange agreement between the Irish and US actors' unions. He will also bring Irish actors to Minneapolis, to perform at the Guthrie.

It was "a very conscious step" on his and Barnes's part, with the aim of building a relationship between the Guthrie and the Abbey. "We have a huge amount in common and it can only strengthen both sides," says Dowling.

The decision to stage All My Sons now was not an act of awesome inspiration as we observe the sons of America marching as to war. Although about the second World War, the play is set after 1945 and has more to do with corruption than with war. Its central character, Joe Keller, became wealthy selling flawed equipment to the army, causing unnecessary death. In biblical parlance, he is a man who sold his soul for money. Or, at best, who placed his family's welfare before his responsibilities to society.

When he staged it at the Guthrie, last May, Dowling was more conscious of corporate corruption in the US, particularly at Enron, where some few executives lost millions of ordinary people's pension funds as they attempted to enrich themselves.

Streetwise Keller pulled himself up by the bootstraps and made money by any means possible in the belief that "a man can't be a Jesus in this world". With dreadful consequences.

The play will have resonances, too, "in our dear little country", says Dowling. That it should be staged at the Abbey at this time of uncertainty about war in Iraq is "fortuitous".

In recent years Dowling has come to know Miller. He staged the world premiere of the playwright's most recent drama, Resurrection Blues, at the Guthrie.

He says Miller is one of the most impressive people he has met. "He has a deep integrity, a goodness, an amazing sense of humour," according to Dowling.

"I love his plays. He deals with the big issues and has never met an issue he didn't want to confront. He has the moral courage of a great writer while also being a deeply political man."

Miller is also "very moral" and "a quintessentially American writer with a deep understanding of his people" that goes beyond his own Jewish community to embrace the melting-pot realities of the broader US. "He also values the theatrical highly, while there is naturalism to all his plays. I respond to that kind of theatre."

All My Sons opens at the Abbey on Friday, running until March 29th. For tickets, €15-€25, call 01-8787222