Cultural identity: a pair of words as slippery as "bar" and "soap". From the perspective of our own country, it's difficult to put a definition on what national culture is, so what is the result when we attempt to define Irish culture for other countries?

The first festival of Irish culture abroad of any significance was A Sense of Ireland, in London in 1980, which was two years in the planning. John Stephenson was its director. "Irish culture is now riding on the crest of a wave, but back then, in 1980, Ireland saw itself as a cultural backwater, where only dead artists mattered," he says. "I was part of a wave of young artists who didn't feel like that."

A Sense of Ireland ran over six weeks in London, encompassing theatre, dance, music, visual arts, and literature. The Chieftans played the Albert Hall for three nights, and were subsequently invited to tour China, an opportunity very few Westerners got in 1980. U2 finalised their record deal after playing at the festival. Seamus Heaney packed out the Roundhouse in Camden Town. "It was unheard of at that time that a poet would fill such a large venue."

Stephenson thinks A Sense of Ireland's greatest achievement was that "funding for the arts became a reality as opposed to a joke. As a direct result of that festival, the Cultural Relations Committee's budget multiplied. And we pioneered the idea of commercial and business sponsorship for the arts."

Since then, there have been several major Irish cultural festivals abroad. Among them were L'imaginaire Irlandais in France,

Ireland and its Disapora in Frankfurt (both in 1996), and the Island: Arts from Ireland festival in Washington, which ran last month. Ireland currently has a pavilion at EXPO 2000 in Hannover, and this year entered the Venice Biennale of Architecture for the first time.

So what image of ourselves do these events give to countries? What are their aims? And how are their successes or failures measured? Perhaps one of the merits of cultural festivals is the questions they raise, thus removing any element of complacency from their equations. Certainly, when public money is spent on festivals such as these, the public will have a healthy interest in how that money is spent: particularly when so few of us at home have firsthand experience of these foreign festivals. The year before the six-month, countrywide L'imaginaire Irlandais opened, its commissioner, Doireann Ni Bhrian, said: "What we are trying to do is the very antithesis of creating an official culture. We simply want to reflect the intense cultural activity that is happening in Ireland." The festival had a three-year lead-in time, and the £3 million budget came more or less equally from Ireland and France. "This meant we could programme a year or two in advance, and we were able to get events into major venues, such as the Abbey into the Odeon in Paris. We were part of their national mainstream programme."

Ni Bhrian is confident that the festival achieved its objectives. "We exposed French audiences to work they would not otherwise have seen, and established networks between French and Irish artists." While tourism or trade was never an official element of her brief, she notes that there were some spins-offs which occurred organically. "The Bord Failte figures in Paris for the following year showed a significant increase in the number of French visitors to Ireland."

Ireland is the only European country that does not have a cultural touring agency, so each cultural event outside Ireland tends to set its own agendas. There is a Cultural Relations Committee, which is part of the Department of Foreign Affairs and which has been in existence for 50 years. The committee is voluntary, and its members are appointed by the Minister for Foreign Affairs. This year, its budget was increased from £500,000 to £900,000, from which funding is allocated to cultural events outside Ireland. The 20-strong committee meets four times a year to consider applications.

In September 1997, Birgit Breuel, EXPO's commissioner general, arrived in Dublin to meet government representatives to find out why Ireland had not agreed to participate in EXPO 2000. She stressed the key role Europe would be playing in EXPO, and commented tartly that "the European market is the beginning and the end for Ireland . . . If Ireland does not take the EU seriously, we have all done something wrong."

Six months later, Ireland was the last EU member state to confirm attendance. Tom Kitt declared that EXPO would give Ireland the chance to "showcase the excellence of our industry and technology sectors". Culture was not mentioned. In August of 1998, he publicly defended the allocation of £6 million of National Lottery funds to EXPO, and said culture would be a strong element of the programme. By March this year, funding had increased to £9.1 million.

Fiach Mac Conghail was appointed cultural director of the Irish EXPO presentation in September last year. He is responsible for all the cultural activities which take place outside the Irish pavilion: a team headed by Orna Hanly is responsible for the cultural elements within the pavilion. "EXPO isn't an arts festival. Ireland's participation in EXPO is because of economics, and Germany is a very important market. My brief was to animate Ireland's personality at EXPO," Mac Conghail says. "Germany has had a rural view of Ireland, and my job is to try and open up that a little. What is Ireland? I don't have any answers to that, but I can ask questions."

The EXPO organisers were originally hoping for 40 million visitors during its five-month run, but they have now revised that figure to 25 million. Ticket sales are running at 70,000 a day, instead of the hoped-for 261,000 per day. Some 550 on-site staff have already lost their jobs. This is not any one country's fault, but the participants are not getting the audiences they were hoping for, and several of them must be feeling sore about the amount of money they have spent.

As a country, we now have a national confidence that was unthinkable 20 years ago: we like to think that others now know who we are. Perhaps we now need to be less zealous in representing ourselves abroad.

If nothing else, festivals offer valuable opportunities to Irish artists across a range of disciplines, many of whom are little better off than they were two decades ago. Some are considerably worse off, having lost the cheap studio and performance spaces that were the norm in the pre-property boom. Being invited to participate in exhibitions abroad, quite apart from publicity, means a fee, sometimes a substantial one. "Festivals help sustain artists," Mac Conghail states. Whether we think that is a good thing or not depends on the value we put on cultural activity.

Further information on the events in the Irish pavilion at EXPO 2000 in Hannover is available from: www.expo2000.ie and www.eventguide.ie/portal