Irish comedians deserve more money. Lots more. A grateful nation should be pressing large wads of cash into the hands of every jobbing joke-maker in the country. Budget planners, North and South, should worry less about the promotion of Ulster Scots and the status of working spouses and more about the state of the comic health.

I say this because I am a comedian and this is an expensive time of the year. And also because, frivolous as it may seem, comedy is important. It is often undervalued as an element of our national culture, but comedy has helped to define and influence the better aspects of modern Ireland.

So we deserve a bit of appreciation. After all, comedians never end up in tribunals explaining their off-shore accounts and their expenditure on shirts. Nor do they claim industrial deafness caused by audience applause - and they're a lot cheaper and more entertaining than your average barrister.

Comedians are in the vanguard of the new Irish identity - confident, pluralist, forward-thinking, anti-sectarian, usually anti-sexist and best of all they don't take themselves too seriously.

I'm not pretending that every Irish comic is a font of Swiftean satire or Wildean wit, but the explosion of Irish comedy, particularly in the last decade, is a cultural phenomenon that deserves proper recognition.

Despite the best efforts of RTE, Irish comedy has flourished. Mostly in Britain, of course. But let's not be petty - most of us can get BBC and Channel 4.

British television has readily accepted the talents of Dylan Moran, Pauline McLynn, Graham Norton and Tommy Tiernan. And Father Ted, of course, has secured its place in the pantheon of classic sitcoms, not because of the untimely death of Dermot Morgan, but because of the free-flowing joy in the writing of Linehan and Mathews.

What was simply hilarious to a British audience was slightly more meaningful for Irish viewers because Father Ted marked the final decline of the Catholic State.

Club comedians had been lambasting the hierarchy for years, and anti-clericalism was old hat even before Bishop Casey made everyone into an amateur comedian. But Father Ted was all the more devastating for its gentleness, its lack of rancour or bitterness. It was, instead, an affectionate lampooning of a clergy which, it was assumed, the audience had lost all respect for.

The controversy surrounding Tommy Tiernan's "blasphemous" routine on The Late Late Show in 1997 merely confirmed that comedians were more in touch with the new, secular Ireland than many of Gaybo's viewers. The outrage was as loud as it was ineffective and anachronistic.

I'm not suggesting that comedians created prosperous modern Ireland or brought peace to the North - merely that they can often more accurately reflect the realities of modern Ireland than those who work in other artforms. Nor am I suggesting that Irish comedians form a homogenous association of like-minded people.

Most comics are egotists who enjoy nothing more than seeing a rival die on his or her arse. We're all trying to earn a living, after all. But is clear that, while Ireland has always had a rich comedy tradition, a newly wealthy country - even one which retains grotesque inequalities in wealth - is a healthy environment for comic creativity.

In southern comedy there is a confidence - a cockiness, even - in being part of a cosmopolitan Europe. As Deirdre Falvey and Stephen Dixon illustrate in their book on Irish comedy, The Gift of the Gag, Irish comedians are no longer obsessed with their Irishness.

And their influences are not just Spike Milligan, Flann O'Brien and Dave Allen, but the Simpsons, and Reeves and Mortimer. The greatest compliment you could pay Graham Linehan is to tell him that Father Ted is as good as Fawlty Towers.

Up North, of course, things are different. Here we are obsessed with our Irishness - or lack of it. The Troubles and all their consequences made the cultural landscape somewhat less than fertile. Partition did succeed in creating two different peoples.

Northerners are different to Southerners. We like to whinge. It's one of our more notable traits. We feel so hard done by, that when we are actually hard done by, we accept it gladly like a warm comfort blanket.

Comedians can tell us much about what is happening in our society. In the era when Frank Carson and Jimmy Cricket were the doyens of Northern Irish society, not much was happening. We were either emigrating or stagnating.

Mid-conflict, we were afraid to mention the war. But that fear was a real fear and, allied to a lack of comedy venues which had not been bombed, it made Northern Ireland virtually joke-free.

It wasn't until the late 1980s and early 1990s - due partly to the emergence of the Empire Comedy Club and partly to the willingness of BBC Northern Ireland to take risks with new talent - that comedy which was prepared to confront the issues of violence and sectarianism finally emerged.

It was comedy that reflected a war-weariness and an unwillingness on the part of younger people to get involved in a sterile political debate. It was comedy that could be harsh, cynical, sarcastic and black. It was comedy that didn't travel very well. Certainly not across the border.

Satire is a minority sport at the best of times - but satire dealing with the "black North" is the indoor sailing of minority sports. For people outside Northern Ireland, the Northern Ireland issue is put into a box marked "too difficult".

It's hard to blame them. Why should they be interested? That said, Britain seems more willing to give alternative voices a chance. The Hole in the Wall Gang's first break in comedy, Two Ceasefires and a Wedding got a network showing on BBC 2 and won a Royal Television Society Award for Best Regional Programme. RTE rejected the show as "not relevant to its audience".

When Henry Kissinger was awarded a Nobel peace prize, an American wit declared that satire was dead. With Martin McGuinness ensconced as Minister for Education, it is tempting to say that same for Northern Irish satire.

The peace process is slowing leading to a release from the shackles of a conflict mentality. Sectarianism will still exist for a generation or more, but we have the chance to make it less and less relevant. New jokes are needed. I told you we deserve more money.

Tim McGarry is a comedy actor and stand-up with the Hole in the Wall Gang, which includes Damon Quinn and Michael McDowell. The team was behind the recent BBC hit sitcom, Give My Head Peace. A video and a book of the series are on sale