Dermot Desmond's butler might well shimmy into his Croke Park-sized bedroom this morning and declare: "Stay in bed this morning sire, for you if you read this morning's The Irish Times, you will assume that you are unwell.
Please, take a sleeping pill. Rise, if you will, at noon, by which time, all copies of the vexatious newspaper will have been destroyed, for several square miles around, and you will know peace of mind."
The butler would merely be responding to what follows in this column: approval of Dermot Desmond's proposal to the Taoiseach to assist in relocating the new Abbey to the International Financial Services Centre.
The butler - God bless him - would naturally think that this was a colossal practical joke, since it is well known that all writers in this newspaper all think that a State-subsidised national theatre is a perfectly wizard idea.
Wrong: entirely wrong. What this country needs is more wealthy private patrons of the arts: that is, more Dermot Desmonds, and infinitely less government.
Now as is well known, I am a stooge of capitalism. In winter, I downhill-ski with the rich and famous at Barbados, and I spend the summer yachting with the crowd at the marinas at Klosters and St Moritz. I am in the pocket of the rich and the famous: yet this conspicuous wickedness notwithstanding, I have never met Dermot Desmond. Nonetheless, I would be more interested in a theatre sponsored by people such as him than one borne down by the leaden ballast of state subsidy and political interference.
Herewith the first national heresy. We don't need a State theatre, simply because we haven't got enough Irish plays worth preserving by State intervention. Our theatrical heritage is simply too small to warrant a vast State protective endeavour: we have no theatrical Pyramids, no Shakespeare, no Coliseum.
What is the stock of great, national theatre productions? Juno and Earnest; The Shadow of Lady Windermere's Fan; The Ploughboy of the Western World; Riders to the Stars; Waiting for Pygmalion. Damn them all. You can only spread a limited ball of yarn so far, and Irish dramaturgy has been theatrically stretched as thin as the walls of a soap balloon. Moreover, the great early Irish playwrights were writing within the traditional British canon. They were not consciously writing "Irish" plays, as if that term had a meaning for most of them, but were writing plays for the available market. It is still the market, not state money, which has kept these plays alive.
To be sure, Tom Kilroy wrote a brilliant Irish version of She Stoops to Conquer, indicating that its true setting, within Goldsmith's mind, might have been in Ireland. But that is by-the-by: Goldsmith's works, like Farquhar's, Sheridan's, Shaw's, and Wilde's, are set in an English dramatic convention. They do not need an Irish national theatre to protect them.
Admittedly, the idea of "national theatre" seemed attractive at a certain point in the development of Irish nationhood and identity, but that hour passed long ago. The justification for a State-sponsored national theatre is now dead, and has been for decades: after all, what has the Abbey actually achieved for Ireland in the past 50 years? So, back to Dermot Desmond, who I would take it is not the fiscal equivalent of the Archangel Gabriel. No matter. We should not seek conspicuous piety in the running of our theatre, but action, dynamism, inventiveness: and these are the qualities of adventure capitalists, not of dreary political appointees to theatrical boards. That's why the most important dramatic art of the 20th century has been on screen rather than stage, not least because the screen has been untrammelled by state and unguided by ideology. To the dismay of the statist patricians, good film, even though unsubsidised, can make money.
Plain people are not merely intelligent enough to know what they like, but more amazingly still, are prepared to pay for it. Great God, Carruthers, whatever next! The Home Box Office television revolution in the US is stunning proof of the power and the virtues of market forces upon popular arts. Six Feet Under - before it sank under its own weight of sub-Foucaultian portentousness - was a genuine artistic ice-breaker, going far beyond anything the BBC or Channel 4 had tried: we do not even mention Montrose.
So why do we need a State-sponsored national theatre? Let Brian Friel live or die by his audiences. His works grow in stature as time goes by.
Conversely, Tom Murphy's recede into the self-indulgent, post-adolescent artistic tantrum in which they were conceived. One does not need State subvention, and the other does not deserve it. Let it be so.
The left flank of the Liffey, looking lazy at the sea, is, as Dermot Desmond points out, a perfectly splendid location for a new theatre, and the ideal focus for the growth of Dublin on a new maritime axis. He cites the brilliant Sydney Opera House as a model, as well he might. It was a municipal project, to be sure, but that was when everyone thought the state should be involved in theatre - as once upon a time, we did here too.
And we called our own sorry consequence, "The Abbey". To the petrified organ that is the State-owned national theatre, we might repeat the words of that young master of the arts, Oliver Cromwell, to another forum: "You have been sat here too long for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!"