CROWDS of small children fill the Abbey Street doorway that leads to the offices of the Down to Earth theatre company. A small sign inside the door warns the children against hanging out here while waiting for their buses.

But although, for more than five years, Down to Earth has made offering educational drama to schoolchildren a large part of its business, nobody waiting around today seems particularly moved by this message from the company.

Whether the guidance the company has offered in school halls all over the country since 1991 about the dangers of global warming, about the necessity of recycling, or about the destructive power of pollution, will have a greater effect, may take many years to discover.

There is no doubt, however that this one, small notice notwithstanding, the company has been uniquely successful in unearthing innovative ways of funding the communication of their ideas.

When it became apparent late last year, through the Arts Council's Theatre Review research, that a little know, Dublin based company was in receipt of funding to the tune of £450,000, a figure bettered in Irish theatre only by the Gate and the National Theatre, the news surprised many theatre practitioners. Equally unexpected was the discovery that the company received their funding not from the Arts Council, but from FAS. How had a theatre company grown so large when it had been refused financial support by the Arts Council? What did this mean about the way the arts were being funded in Ireland? Who were Down to Earth?

UPSTAIRS in the office, the company's administrator, Shane O'Doherty, and its artistic director, Lynne Kinlon, gather to begin explaining their company. On the desk beside the tape recorder lie three mobile phones and, like a portent of things to come, a thick, cream coloured tome marked "More Bread and Circuses: Who Does What for the Arts in Europe".

Down to Earth was founded in 1990, by Kinlon and four other actors from the Dublin School of Acting. Like many sapling theatre companies, Down to Earth's first productions were during the long summer breaks. "We formed the company specifically to go out and produce theatre that had a social comment," says Kinlon. "And to employ young actors that weren't in work at the time. To encourage networks. We felt that we could stimulate employment for actors who had come out of full time training."

Initially, the company offered shows and activities to summer projects, but soon other possibilities emerged. "We decided to have a look at the curriculum and approach it all a bit more seriously. We felt during that summer that we had discovered a niche in the market because there wasn't an awareness, even down to the very basics, like recycling, the ozone layer, pollution, that kind of thing. What we're trying to do by going into schools is a very hands on exercise. By saying this is the problem, now what can you do in your life? In your domestic situation? In your community? So that it is not a just hypothetical situation . . . to us, the environment is equally the social implications of community, schooling and education."

What separates Down to Earth from Theatre in Education companies such as, for example, Team, is that as well as their schools and education programme, they have also developed a number of strands to the organisation.

At present the company also runs the Down to Earth Acting Academy, on which pupils are in the midst of a two year course. Also under the company's umbrella are an adult circus troop, Sorcas, and a "mirror" Down to Earth company in Galway, taking care of business West of the Shannon, while remaining answerable to the Dublin HQ. As Kinlon and O'Doherty's reading matter might suggest, they are also actively investigating European expansion, in the form of coproductions.

GIVEN the burgeoning nature of this theatrical empire, it hardly comes as a surprise that the company has also recently taken over a space in Lombard street formerly used by Trinity College. Here, they intend to have it operating as a venue, as well as somewhere that all the elements of Down To Earth can meet up, by the end of this year.

To this day, Down to Earth still states one of its prime aims as the provision of employment for actors and theatre professionals. On this score, they have been doing pretty well; 169 people have worked with the company since it was founded, and there are currently 80 people on the books. These may not be huge numbers of industrial terms, but they do represent substantial employment for the theatre sector. Not everybody, however, is entirely convinced that this is an absolute good.

Gerry Browne, of Irish Actors' Equity for one, has mixed feelings about the project. "The situation is that we see that young actors have very restricted employment opportunities and therefore would find it hard to refuse most types of work," he says "but schemes that do not operate under the Standard Equity Agreement [which Down to Earth does not] may not really help the situation."

Supporters of the company are, however, less equivocal. Joe Tunney is the person responsible for orchestrating the schemes that Down to Earth sponsors through FAS. Tunney evaluates each scheme in terms of the total numbers approved, the turnover of participants, the percentage of participants from "the inner city partnership area" (basically, the territory between the Grand and the Royal Canal) the percentage of people on the scheme who are 45 years or over, the percentage of lone parents, and the numbers who achieve full or part time employment, or education after the scheme. He also makes a "summary of achievement to date" which includes TV and press exposure and complimentary letters from participants and audiences.

However, there is no assessment of the quality of production staged, artistically or technically, among the criteria for supporting a scheme. "Well, we have no experts in FAS in that respect," says Tunney, before veering off into a numerical analysis of Down to Earth's last FAS scheme. "Our priority right now," he says "are the 300,000 people who are unemployed."

DESPITE regular applications, the company has not yet received any from the body most likely to fund its type of work, the Arts Council. Nevertheless, Shane O'Doherty maintains a very temperate attitude to the organisation. "We appreciate, from dealing with moneys all the time, how they are fixed, and how little money they have compared to the number of people looking for it," O'Doherty says, "so I think we made an unconscious decision to set the whole thing up so that people would find it difficult to ignore us."

"You see, we were determined, because of the ideas that were behind the company, that we were not going to fail due to a lack of funding," Kinlon adds.

Did they ever consider that the Arts Council's rejection of them had a particular comment to make about the work they were doing? Did it ever make them think that there was something lacking in their work?

"Every published author will have received hundreds of rejection slips. If you believe in what you are doing at all, you can't let other people dictate," says O'Doherty. "We can stand back and say that a hell of a lot of the people who come through our doors are working in professional theatre. You can't, just because money is not available, sit back and say that this reflects on your work. So we didn't sit back and moan about not getting funds, we went out and found them."

O'Doherty's refusal to wait around for institutional sanction for his plans has lead him in directions other than theatre. In 1994, he published his first novel, The Immaculate Deception. The book is a short satire on Irish life, in which advertising spinners have more effect on the government of the nation than any politician, and where, in the turbulence of abortion referenda, the country is plundered by strokemasters and right wing extremist organisations like "the Organisation for the Rejects of Abortion Legislation" and "the Society of Extremist Xenophobics".

The back cover of the book bears the announcement: "Down to Earth Publications". "I got artist's status for writing that book, but many people I know wouldn't consider it art," he says, before disappearing into his office to fetch a copy, from what he hints is a very large pile.