The Wexford Festival Opera is the latest Irish arts organisation to find itself in the throes of a crisis, writes Michael Dervan.

The screeching peacocks weren't the only strange sounds to be heard at this month's Wexford Festival Opera at Johnstown Castle. There were frequent moans about Kurt Weill's Silverlake being an overlong, boring play and not an opera. There were words of praise for the playing of the Wexford Festival Orchestra in Dvorák's Rusalka, the first full-size Irish orchestra to be heard in the Wexford pit after years of variable collaboration with Eastern Europeans in the Theatre Royal. And there were the dark messages on the rumour mill, which was in full flight about the future of chief executive, Michael Hunt.

Clarification on the chief executive's position emerged not directly from either side, but through the High Court, where Hunt and the festival are now thrashing out their differences. The court has granted the chief executive a temporary injunction restraining the Wexford Festival Trust from removing him from his post, and the case is due back in court next week.

Whatever way you look at it, it's not good news for the festival if it parts with its chief executive at the present time. There's the huge, €33 million project, now well underway, of building a new theatre on the site of the old Theatre Royal. There's a first festival to be delivered in that new theatre in October 2008. There's a year-round programme of events to be planned and managed in the theatre, including residencies by both a dance and a theatre company.

Dealing with a dispute in the High Court consumes time, energy and money. And this case also delays setting in train the formal process of recruiting someone to take over the reins of the company. Strange as it may seem, there's not a single person on the festival board with in-depth working experience of the wider world of opera. Even the crisis precipitated in September 2005 by the sudden death of the festival's then chief executive, Jerome Hynes, is surely dwarfed by the challenges the festival now faces.

The rift between the Wexford board and its chief executive follows on the hugely controversial crisis at the National Youth Orchestra of Ireland, sparked by the board's decision to merge its two main orchestras, and the unexpected fracture at the National Chamber Choir, which saw both the chief executive and the artistic director resign due to differences with the board. These conflicts pale beside the upheavals at the Abbey Theatre in 2005 and the Irish Museum of Modern Art in 2001.

In all of these other cases, of course, there were board members who also took the plunge and resigned. No such question seems yet to have arisen at Wexford.

Questions are, however, being asked about why so many major arts organisations have gone through or are going through such crises. The Arts Council has obvious concerns in this area, and last year published in print and electronic form "A practical guide for board members of arts organisations".

The story may have a few more chapters to run. There are unhealthy-sounding noises of conflict coming from the West Cork Chamber Music Festival, where former Arts Council director Patricia Quinn last year joined the board and took up the chairmanship. Odd as it may seem, artistic standards and output are not what most of the crises have so far been about. In this regard the rumbles from West Cork are already matching the profile.