As with the news, mainstream cinema tends to deal with side issues of poverty, particularly crime - which is used to very dramatic effect. In fact, there is so much excitement you'd nearly want to be a poor armed robber, for all the crack you'd have every day. Mostly when it comes to cinema, poverty doesn't exist. Money often isn't an issue: extravagant jet-setting is the norm. But some directors take a more realistic look at life. My Name is Joe, directed by Ken Loach and currently on release here, tells the story of a recovering alcoholic in Glasgow. Everyone in his community lives in poverty; some have been involved in drugs and find finding it difficult get away from that world. There is no glamourisation of their lives, no one-dimensional cardboard characters used to make a point. Poverty is a fact of life.
Often when poverty appears in Hollywood films, it is in the form of comic characters, as in Down and Out in Beverly Hills - which stars Nick Nolte as a homeless bum who impinges on the lives of a rich family to "hilarious" effect. Alternatively films (often with the best of intentions) such as The Fisher King starring Robin Williams and Jeff Bridges or With Honors starring Joe Pesci only succeed in sentimentalising homelessness.
On TV, soaps such as Eastenders and Glenroe, which are supposedly about real people who don't have a lot of money, tend to make few references to the complexities of living in poverty. There are neither the visual indications of abject poverty - even the Travellers in Glenroe are never shown to live in especially poor conditions - nor the alienation regularly felt by communities who suffer poverty.
Perhaps we wouldn't watch more realistic depictions of poverty - and TV programme-makers don't usually go out of their way to get their viewers to change to another channel. In the 1970s the makers of Coronation Street attempted to do tougher story-lines. Audience figures dropped, and there was an instant reversion. Brookside, on the other hand, has dealt with social issues, including the problems caused by unemployment and moneylenders.
Would their be a national outcry if the truth about Irish poverty visited us in our sitting rooms every day?