I cannot recall the last time an Irish artist put into the public domain a work which successfully addressed the living reality of society
Observing recent controversies about public funding of the arts, it struck me that members of our artistic community have an enhanced sense of what their country can do for them but little understanding of what they can do for their country.
We do not have here an artistic ethic concerned with the public good, rather an ideology of disengagement which maintains that art is essentially concerned with the private soul of the individual. Not only are artists not obliged to have a public vision - they are all but forbidden to have one.
Hence, the only public issue artists get exercised about is the funding of art. We have great artists here, without doubt, but not ones who lay claim to a public mission. I cannot recall the last time an Irish artist put into the public domain a work which successfully addressed the living reality of society at that moment.
Sebastian Barry's play, Hinterland, last year, made an attempt, but failed largely because the ideology of disengagement led to it being sabotaged from within, creating a piece of voyeurism rather than an instrument of moral elucidation.
It is, then, a chastening irony that the Abbey Theatre this week opens with a Joe Dowling-directed production of All My Sons, by the greatest living American playwright, Arthur Miller; which, despite being written more than 50 years ago, comes closer to addressing the moral life of this society now than anything produced by local artists in the interim.
This is so because the play's core theme concerns what might be termed the ecology of corruption: the effect of dirty money on the consciences of those who have chosen wrongly between saying what they sense to be true and keeping silent while the going is good.
The story concerns the Keller family, respectable and comfortable, having made their money from the manufacture of airplane parts during a war which cost Joe and Kate Keller one of their sons, Larry.
The greatest of Miller's many strengths as a playwright is the intelligence and breadth of his moral imagination. His is no Sunday School morality, but a profound searching for core values to inform the question asked by great dramatists since the Greeks: how should men live? He is unashamedly a social artist, his project what he calls "the psychic journalism of the stage".
All My Sons is concerned not so much with the more obvious immorality of Joe Keller's involvement in the manufacture of faulty airplane parts which caused the deaths of pilots in war, but with the underlying aspects which are obscured by this (relative) veniality.
What he was after, Miller wrote in the Introduction to his Collected Plays, was "the wonder in the fact that consequences of actions are as real as the actions themselves".
The fortress to which All My Sons lays siege, he elaborated, "is the fortress of unrelatedness. It is an assertion not so much of a morality in terms of right and wrong, but of a moral world's being such because men cannot walk away from certain of their deeds."
Joe Keller's real offence relates to - and think about this the next time you hear an Irish arts administrator bleating about funding cutbacks - his moral disengagement, which, in Miller's words, "has its roots in a certain relationship of the individual to society and to a certain indoctrination he embodies, which, if dominant, can mean a jungle existence for all of us no matter how high our buildings soar".
It has often struck me that, in the public responses to the exposure of corruption Irish-style, there is a determination to short-circuit the meaning of events so they come to signify purely the venality of individuals or institutions against which long-standing social grudges are held and which anyway have outlived their usefulness.
The truth about church abuses, for example, has been known, or at least sensed, for a generation, but only now, with the revelation of detailed information, do we contrive to become outraged. Unlike Irish society and journalism, Arthur Miller never points one finger.
He depicts, too, how immorality can be camouflaged beneath a bogus innocence, how people can sometimes half-conceal their deeper knowledge of the truth from others and even from themselves. And herein lies the real rub: that it is in the damage wrought by the denial that the relatively technical act of wrongdoing wreaks its true destruction, in corrupting not just the consciences of individuals but the very channels of public morality.
It is not surprising that journalism does not, in the main, point out such things, since journalism is largely a conduit of public prejudice. But it is dismal that we do not have within our indigenous artistic infrastructure the means of placing such observations under the public nose.
Instead, we must look to a different century, a different civilisation and a man whose direct knowledge or Irish society is, from what we know of him, minuscule.
It should be a source of embarrassment to Irish artists, clamouring for public funding, that this is the case.