Opera Ireland is in a state of financial crisis. And yet British cities like Leeds, Cardiff and Glasgow can sustain major opera companies. Michael Dervan travelled the UK drawing comparisons and reckons we don't lack the money, we lack the will.

At the beginning of the 21st century, Ireland stands out among the nations of Europe - its capital city has neither an opera house nor a full-time opera company. Opera still abounds in the altogether poorer surroundings of the former Eastern bloc countries, with even territories formerly incorporated into the Soviet Union managing to maintain national opera companies.

The impoverished state of Moldova - where GDP per capita is less than an eighth of the Irish level - is a regular exporter of touring productions to Ireland and Britain.

Closer to home, there are national companies based in Cardiff and Glasgow, and another full-time company, Opera North, based in Leeds. Here in Ireland, we have the extraordinary situation that Opera Ireland, on higher public funding than ever before - albeit paltry by international standards - and with the benefit of a supplementary grant that more than cleared its accumulated deficit, is running a curtailed season this spring and facing funding difficulties over its season next winter.

It is not all that unusual for opera to be in the news for all the wrong reasons. The Royal Opera House in London struggled openly for years, and washed its dirty linen more publicly than anyone imagined possible, when a fly-on-the-wall television documentary series engaged audiences as a cliff-hanging, real-life soap opera. Berlin has had to agonise over its abundance of opera houses in the wake of reunification. And four years ago, in one of the most startling decisions of recent years, Opera Northern Ireland was de-funded by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland (ACNI).

The ACNI decision was originally part of a thrust towards the creation of an all-Ireland opera company. But that move faded as quickly and unexpectedly as it had surfaced.

However, you may well wonder what is it, that enables regional British cities such as Leeds, Cardiff and Glasgow to sustain opera companies while a European capital like Dublin can't?

Leeds is probably the most interesting case. Opera North opened for business in 1978 and was planned to be the first national opera company in England outside London. As the programme book for the company's 21st birthday concert put it: "The creation of Opera North was an act of faith which miraculously drew together national government, in the shape of the Arts Council, and local government - the City of Leeds and the West Yorkshire Authority - in a visionary partnership." The direct outcome of the unusual act of faith is, as general director Richard Mantle points out, that "Leeds now has more opera performances than any other city in Britain outside of London. There are about 45 to 50 performances a year here."

The company also tours, "to Newcastle, the Lowry in Salford, Nottingham; three weeks in each place. On top of that, we're supposed to go to Sheffield and Hull and Norwich for a week each, with occasional visits to York, where the theatre's quite small." The "supposed to" is explained by funding problems, which have kept touring down from 12 weeks to nine or under in recent years.

Opera North received "stabilisation" funding of £1.6 million sterling last year, which may enable a turnaround of some sort in the touring situation. It has also enabled the company to clear its deficit, but the adjustment to core funding, Mantle feels, has still left the budgetary situation too tight for comfort; the company is tightly constrained in the number of new productions it can afford to mount.

The stabilisation process involved "quite a severe interrogation of our finances," says Mantle, "and we came out with a very clean bill of health, really. We're not over-resourced. We're not luxurious. We're not profligate. We operate in a very lean way and probably need more money. But everybody seems to have ignored that last bit."

The company's home base is the 1,500-seat Grand Theatre, which is owned by Leeds City Council. It's a Victorian theatre with an auditorium which pleases the eye and the ear more than the rest of the body, and time-warping, cheaply-veneered foyer spaces which spell mid-century embarrassment with Victorian decorative taste. Plans for refurbishment and the building of new rehearsal spaces are currently underway.

Mantle's list of the repertoire that has brought the company fame and fortune might seem a little odd to Dubliners at first glance - Prokofiev's Love for Three Oranges, Berg's Wozzeck, Britten's Gloriana, Chabrier's L'Étoile, Debussy's Pelléas et Méelisande, Martinu's Julietta.

But, then, the Opera Ireland productions that people talk about most these days are Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth, Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov, Strauss's Salome, Turnage's Silver Tassie, and Handel's Giulio Cesare. Opera North has an eclectic choice of seven works planned for next season: new productions of Puccini's Tosca and Mozart's Magic Flute; productions of Strauss's Rosenkavalier and Mozart's Idomeneo that are new to Leeds; and revivals of Janá Mcek's Jenufa, Cimarosa's Secret Marriage, and Julietta.

Scottish Opera has probably featured in a greater number and variety of scary headlines than any other regional British opera provider in recent years. The company currently carries a deficit which chief executive Chris Barron describes as "a small number of hundreds of thousands". But between the autumn of 1999 and the spring of 2001 the company's deficit payments totalled £4 million sterling, "chunky money," as he says with a smile, now that the worst of that particular issue is behind him.

Scottish Opera was founded 40 years ago by a small group of enthusiastic individuals, chief among them being the conductor Alexander Gibson.

Unlike Opera North and Welsh National Opera, it owns its own venue, the handsome 1,500-seat Theatre Royal, purchased in 1974. Its 65 large-scale performances are spread over Glasgow (32 nights), Edinburgh, Inverness and Aberdeen and although English touring was once an important part of its work, a "spheres of influence" policy by Arts Council of England has meant that it's now Opera North rather than Scottish Opera which performs in Newcastle. Within Scotland, the company plays in 50 locations, adapting as necessary to venue size with productions accompanied either by piano or small orchestra, or by presenting concert performances.

"Our problem and the problem for the audience," says Barron, "is that we're not doing enough main-scale performances. We're still in delicate years after our rather large crisis of two years ago. We're doing six operas a year, which is tiny." The repertoire for the current season is Wagner's Die Walküure, Verdi's La traviata, Mozart's Così fan tutte, Sally Beamish's Monster, Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier and Puccini's Madama Butterfly. "The long-term plan, to March 2007, will take us up to seven and eight operas a year, which is still much less than 20 years ago."

Although he's clearly dissatisfied with the size of the repertoire, as well as the proportion of new productions (two out of the six), Barron points with pride to the company's ongoing Ring cycle as an indication of Scottish Opera's artistic resolve. That resolve has also continued to bring new opera to Scottish audiences, James MacMillan's Inez de Castro in 1997, David Horne's Friend of the People in 1999, and Sally Beamish's Monster this year; in the 1970s the company managed to present new works by Iain Hamilton, Robin Orr, Thomas Wilson and Thea Musgrave in successive years.

Strange as it may seem at first sight, Welsh National Opera (WNO) actually receives more grant aid from the Arts Council of England than from the Arts Council of Wales - the agreed split is 60/40 and the current total is£7.8 million sterling. The explanation is demographic. There's a far greater audience within touring reach in England than there is in Wales, and the Arts Council of England wants what WNO has to offer. With only three venues in Wales suitable for main-scale opera (in Cardiff, Swansea and Llandudno) the English tours are essential to the company's well-being. It mounts more than 100 full performances a year, and claims to be the largest touring opera company of its type in the world.

WNO has lived through the familiar scenarios of crisis and stabilisation. All of this season's nine productions are revivals, and a tough decision reduced the strength of the orchestra by five. But the future is full of promise. The two arts councils have approved a five-year strategic plan which, with £4.25 million sterling of National Lottery money as well as increased revenue grants, will enable a doubling of touring weeks in Wales, a restoration to 14 weeks in England, and bring a great expansion of community and education work. From 2003, each season will feature four new productions and five revivals.

What's the catch, you might ask. Well, WNO will have to increase its other income, raising £2 million sterling extra at the box office and substantially increasing its sponsorship take. The magic ingredient to make this possible is the Wales Millenium Centre, already under construction, where in a couple of years WNO will at last find all its facilities under a single roof.

The larger auditorium, 1,750 seats as against the 1,100 or so of the New Theatre in Cardiff, will, says chairman Geraint Talfan Davies, allow the company "to reduce the price of tickets, but increase the income. We will sell more seats at a lower ticket price." It's a turnaround that WNO has already achieved on tour, and with the attractions of a new venue, they sound fully confident of repeating the feat at home. On the other hand, sponsorship is a huge challenge.

"Over the next three years, we are going to have to increase our contributed income from £1.2 million sterling to £1.6 million sterling. That means finding sponsors, local authorities, banks. It's a tough proposition, particularly in Wales, where there is frankly virtually no corporate sector. There are fewer than 20 companies headquartered here that have a full stock exchange listing. That's fewer than Leeds. If you look at the Irish corporate sector, you are blessed compared with Wales."

But, unlike its older, nearest Irish counterpart, WNO managed to transform itself from an amateur company founded in 1946 to a full-time company with its own orchestra by 1970.

And how different, you might ask, is the work itself in Leeds, Glasgow and Cardiff to Opera Ireland's work in Dublin? In truth, it's not as significantly different as would have been the case in the past. The differences now lie more in the detail rather than the general thrust of what's to be seen and heard, though obviously Opera Ireland simply can't compete with the sheer substance of what the others can physically put on the stage.

The three British companies, however, consistently show the value of a full-time operation. Everyone involved seems to get to work that much closer to their full potential. However, you might want to argue with any particular aspect - musical, dramatic or vocal - audiences can see and hear how much more tightly the individual and communal artistic conceptions are being realised.

In Dublin, by comparison, the delivery is just that crucial bit looser, less well-focused. Dubliners would get a very pleasant surprise to see a production as detailed as David McVicar's Rosenkavalier for Scottish Opera; a conductor as musically perceptive and commanding as Dietfried Bernet in Opera North's La bohème; or a role so thoroughly assumed as Nuccia Focile's Cio-Cio-San in Madama Butterfly for WNO. And, off the stage, I didn't see a single dinner jacket in the seven performances I attended in the three cities last month.

I was very struck by a one-liner by the WNO chairman. "The trick over the next few years," he said with confidence, "will be learning to triumph without adversity."

That's a problem that Irish opera-lovers in their droves would envy him. Ireland as a nation self-evidently has the resources, but not yet, it appears, the will.

Opera Ireland's Carmen is running at the Gaiety Theatre;