There has been an explosion of arts activity here in the past 15 years, with arts organisations all over the country clamouring for newspaper coverage and bombarding journalists with publicity material. Small arts organisations - theatre companies, galleries etc - have to compete for coverage with the national arts institutions as well as record companies and film distributors, which are often part of large international conglomerates with vast marketing budgets at their disposal.

It's up to the arts editor (Victoria White, in the case of The Irish Times) to try to get the balance right between these competing claims, to maintain the paper's independence from all vested interests, and to make sure that the genuine buzz about activity in the arts is not translated into vacuous hype.

In general, artists are now highly valued and appreciated in Ireland. There has been a significant change of climate from earlier decades, when it was a commonplace for writers, artists and intellectuals to complain about the "philistinism" of the prevailing culture. This is due in part to the way the arts have increasingly come to be associated with national identity and pride: in recent years we have seen the packaging of Irish writers, playwrights, musicians and film-makers in festivals abroad, such as last year's huge L'Imaginaire Irlandais in France.

The relationship between culture and tourism has been consciously developed, too, with a plethora of arts festivals helping to raise the profile of towns and cities - notably Galway.

Festivals are a very convenient way for newspapers to cover the arts, too: they are usually professionally managed and vigorously promoted, and their intense concentration of events and of international guest artists, writers and directors in one place over a week or two makes them easy for journalists to deal with. This can result in them getting a disproportionate allocation of column inches.

The importance of the arts as a growing economic sector providing employment is gaining acknowledgement too: at present, 32,000 people in Ireland are employed in "the cultural industries", which have a value of £440 million per year. Yet, despite this, the audience for the arts remains predominantly middle class.

For those with disposable income, access to the arts is easy. But bearing in mind recent findings about the widespread problem of illiteracy, is hardly surprising that many people in this socially divided country feel excluded from cultural events. These issues - of educational and social policy as well as arts policy - are ones that a newspaper's arts page cannot hope to remedy single-handed, but only be aware of when identifying its readership.

For example, arts pages now carry CD and video reviews, to reflect the growing privatisation of art consumption, with people listening to affordable, pristine CD recordings at home rather than attending concerts - with the result that the world's major orchestras are going into decline, and many will have to be disbanded.