Unless you live in a big town, with lots of money and a musically gifted family, you 're unlikely to make it as a maestro, writes Arminta Wallace

A little more than 20 years ago a report sponsored by the Arts Council declared that music education in Ireland was a mess. The report was called Deaf Ears? and the question mark was superfluous. Two decades on, music education in Ireland is still a mess, and little or nothing has been done to address the underlying conceptual problem. True, there's a new music curriculum in primary schools; true, there are - as there always have been - pockets of high-level instrumental activity here and there.

But training and resources for primary teachers are in notoriously short supply, and high-level instrumental activity doesn't come cheap. To put it bluntly, if you don't a) live in a good-sized town and b) don't have a good-sized bank account and c) your family isn't already up to its elbows in the classical/trad/rock scene, it most unlikely that your child is going to grow up to be the next James Galway or Sharon Shannon or Bono.

It's not as if we don't have a vision of how things could be. There is a blueprint for making musical education available throughout the country and to people of all ages and ranges of talent.

It's a model based on partnership, on the careful cultivation of existing resources and on equality of access. It's doubtless far from perfect, but it might be a start - if it ever gets going. This week it will be discussed in some detail at a seminar organised by the Arts Council and Music Network, Striking the Right Note, at the Coach House in Dublin Castle today.

"Just to get all people from all the relevant areas into one room at one time to make their feelings known is a small step forward," says Deirdre McCrea, chief executive officer of Music Network. "And we've spread our net fairly wide in terms of who we're targeting to attend - representatives of parents' councils, teachers' unions, existing practitioners and third-level institutions. I think the discussions will be very rich on the day."

McCrea was instrumental in putting together a 2003 Music Network report outlining how this brave new musical world might be implemented in Ireland. Heavily reliant on local authorities and vocational education committees, the plan is designed to be flexible enough to take particular conditions in each county into consideration. When it was published, the report attracted widespread applause from the music sector and two pilot schemes were put in place by the Department of Education and Science in accordance with its recommendations, one in Donegal, one in Dublin.

However, these schemes have never been systematically assessed, and momentum has been draining gradually out of the whole project. "In some ways there has been progress and in other ways we're not that much further down the road," McCrea admits.

The idea of this week's seminar is to look at how the pilot schemes have developed in practice, and see how matters might move on from here.

Speakers from Donegal and Dublin will give updates and there'll be live music from young people who have been involved in the music programmes in these areas, including a chamber orchestra from Donegal, a choir from a south Dublin primary school which had no music provision at all before the scheme began, and Junior Cert students from Larkin Community College in Dublin's inner city.

"We want people to see what has come out of this initiative, and let them think about the nature of the activities that can come out of this kind of model," says Karan Thompson, a former music teacher who has been working as an independent consultant on the project. "After that, we'll have a session on partnerships - because everyone wants to have a music partnership, but how do they get there? The structures are very different in each location in Ireland, so a 'one size fits all' approach isn't necessarily going to cut it." Speakers from Sligo and Laois will share their experiences, and there'll be an opportunity for participants to take part in "facilitated breakout sessions" - brainstorming sessions which will cover a range of topics from insurance issues to the way in which new structures might take account of existing music provision.

"This is not a resource-heavy model," says Thompson. "It's not cumbersome, or even particularly expensive. It's all about partnership, about sharing know-ledge and making the most of what you have. It's trying to support the committed individuals who have been carrying the burden of music education, often at great cost to themselves. It's trying to say, 'Hey, there's a way we can develop music education without it just falling to those people for ever and ever'." The organisations involved will, nevertheless, be calling on the Department of Education to provide a certain level of funding for the initiative, which is not about providing specialist tuition for gifted pupils but about a high level of access to music for all Irish children. "This is about providing a standardised level of service to young people in Ireland, no matter where they live, what their cultural background is, or their ability to pay," says McCrea.

"The curriculum support side will provide in-school music education training and that, in turn, will create an increased demand for vocal and instrumental tutors. Obviously it's something that needs to be phased in - it's unrealistic to set a date and say, 'in five years' time we want every county in Ireland to have a music partnership up and running'.

"But I feel that once a handful of counties are receiving support from the government, other areas will begin to mobilise and want to have something of the same calibre happening in their own county."

• Music Network - Music Education Seminar, Striking the Right Note, runs today at the Coach House, Dublin Castle, Dublin, from 9am to 5pm. See  www.musicnetwork.ie