DYLAN TIGHE Actor and performance artist PAT McCabe's latest novel Winterwood is a brilliant allegory of Irishness today. It shows the reality behind the veneer of the Celtic economic delusion and exposes Ireland for what it is: a medieval country propelled to modernity by accident. It holds a mirror up to the grotesque brutality of our era.

It peels back the lies to show the horrors that underline the primitive progress. It does that rare thing in Irish art: it provides an xray image of society as it is felt in the heart. It also manages to be intensely local and universal at the same time - McCabe's great strength as an artist. It exposes both our past and our hollow future as equally nightmarish. It shows the taboos and traumas bubbling just beneath the green plastic surface. At this time of year, when we again celebrate Ireland's most successful and most damaging conqueror, this is the essential antidote.

SHEILA PRATSCHKE Former director at Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Annaghmakerrig and current director at the Irish Cultural Centre in Paris A painting by Patrick Scott: in the centre of the canvas is a deep indigo circle enclosed in a ring of silver. It is still, dark and mysterious.

It fills me with a sense of balance, beauty and infinity. But sometimes it also disturbs, sets me questioning. It was my farewell gift from Annaghmakerrig, chosen for me by the artist.

Pat Scott's paintings can be seen in many galleries and collections.

He is my icon for a contemporary Ireland: ageing into his prime, confident but modest, generous, great company - sharp and funny. He personifies an ideal in greedy, sleazy times. I believe that we need our cultural beacons more than ever if we are to retain (or regain) notions of civic virtue, community, a sense of what is precious rather than merely valuable.

My painting hangs on the wall of this new office, in a new country where my job is to promote the art and culture of my own land. It is a touchstone, something that links me back to the Ireland where artists do work which helps us to make sense of our lives and interpret ourselves to others. Like many people, I suspect, my love of country can be troubled and uncertain; but my pride in representing its artists is simple and wholehearted.

DAVID BOLGER Artistic director of CoisC�im Dance Theatre One of my favourite pieces of sculpture stands 120 metres high and dominates the Dublin skyline:

the Spire of Dublin. It, for me, represents a changing Ireland.

Standing on the sight of the former Nelson's Pillar on O'Connell Street, it was commissioned as part of the redesign of the street.

The whole project was met with much opposition but I think that over the years people have grown fond of this piece, or at least just gotten used to it standing there, proud.

I like the fact that it draws attention from many points around Dublin to the centre. Also, it makes people look skyward. I have often been inspired on my way to work in CoisC�im by its presence. Every time I fly into Dublin Airport I look for it and, when I spot it, I know that I am home. The day it was finally completed in January 2003 I watched with much amusement, not at the finale piece being cranelifted to the top, but at the crowd of onlookers that had gathered, all of them staring to the sky with mouths open. It looked like the second coming!

VERONICA DUNNE Opera teacher and former soprano I was in a daze after I saw The Wind That Shakes The Barley. It showed how both sides were so adamant they were right and, at that time, so full of hatred. When it was over there was dead silence in the cinema. We didn't realise that we did that to one another. It was wonderful, so much so that I made my grandsons - who are American - look at it. I brought each of my grandsons separately. Everything was so wrong at that time and the Irish were very brave, that's what so impressed me, but it was also brother against brother, and on both sides human life meant nothing to them.

My father was at Croke Park on Bloody Sunday in 1920 and the man next to him was shot. It was black-and-white, there was no grey. And that's what we went through with the IRA and UVF in the north and we lived through that. And how they couldn't sit down at the end!

I felt Eamon de Valera came out very badly in it. My grandsons couldn't believe it. I asked them to read about the life of Michael Collins and the de Valera's. I gave them Strumpet City to take back. It was so realistic, it was a wonderful film. I would see it again and again and again. To me, it was the birth of our nation. You have to admire these men who gave their lives. We forget them, but we owe a lot to them, even now.

WILLIE WHITE Artistic director of the Project Arts Centre In 2004, Dublin artists Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor made a film on Moore Street as an instalment in their series of shorts exploring civic life. On the same street where the leaders of the Rising made their last stand, Ireland's Alamo, and around the corner from where The O'Rahilly's life ebbed away - "Darling Nancy, I was shot leading a rush up Moore Street" - they filmed seven black people (one Irish and one wearing a Clare GAA top) walking down the city street in darkness. In a voiceover in Swahili and English a young woman recounted a 21st-century emigrant's letter.

The short was made as part of Ireland's participation at the Sao Paulo Biennial art exhibition. I'm tickled by the idea of a duo from Dublin, resident in London, representing Ireland in Brazil with a film where the performers are not quite from a John Hinde tableau.

After the debacle of the Love Ulster march last year, I thought about a previous march a street away. I wondered if they had missed the point. Love Ireland.

Love Africa.

JOHN BOYNE Author One thing which strikes me as having changed a great deal over recent years is the move among Irish novelists from representing Ireland in their fiction to placing the stories in a more global context. Whether the younger generation of writers feels less trapped or less interested in their homeland is open to debate but it's clear that our thoughts have started to look outwards. Colum McCann has set novels in America and Europe, John Connolly's novels are mostly set in Maine, Claire Kilroy's Tenderwire plays out in New York, while Michael Collins' most recent book is set at a US university. As a reader, I have great respect for those writers who have defined the Irish cultural and political landscape in their work during the last century but as a writer I feel more interested in what is taking place around the world than on my own doorstep.

GERARD MANNIX FLYNN:

Artist Martin Mc Donagh's work The Leenane Trilogy is by far the most outstanding piece of art that would directly relate to Irishness.

The savage comedy is what first grabs you. The resonance of the words goes back generations, yet it is totally contemporary. Within moments of reading the texts you are aware that you're in the company of what can only be 'Irishness'. The idyllic image of the Irish landscape and its inhabitants are shattered and a "terrible beauty" is indeed born in the shape of the Irish family. Family wounds are deep. The dynamic of the Irish family is at the centre of these works. McDonagh exposes the worst aspects of that dynamic with humour, savage wit and outright blunt honesty. He takes the great Irish literary form by the scruff of its dramatic neck and reefs it into great contemporary art. He conducts the words, composes the characters and draws us up close to part of the truth of who we really are - and we, for our part, are uncomfortable with that.

While the Irish family is enshrined in the Irish constitution, McDonagh has ensured that it's also enshrined in the canon of great contemporary art. A tip of me hat to ya, Mr Mc Donagh.

MICHEAL O'SIADHAIL Poet Ireland is probably going through its most rapid period of change ever. Looking at the broader picture, some of what best represents us in literature and drama involves our facing overlooked parts of our history to prepare a new inclusiveness. For me, the compassion for the confused planter in Brian Friel's The Home Place stands for a maturity that opens into our future.

This was part of a process begun over 20 years ago when works such as Frank McGuinness's Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching towards the Somme, Brendan Kennelly's Cromwell or Bernard Farrell's Last Apache Reunion bravely confronted forbidden corners of our psyche.

What is best embraces both the past and the future as in Joe O'Connor's The Star of the Sea or in Mary O'Donnell's 'Exiles' sequence of poems in her The Place of Miracles, which rejoices in a multi-racial Ireland.

I think we should be very proud of Seoirse Bodley's Limerick Symphony (now available on the Marco Polo label), Eric Sweeney's eastern-influenced rhythmic music in Ritual Dance and John Buckley's Campane in Aria.

In painting and sculpture, we distinguish ourselves by a rich palette of styles. Michael Kane exploring through the Orpheus myth the underworld of the outsider, Louis Le Brocquy's homage to his masters, Mick O'Dea's character-catching portraits, the work of Brian Bourke, John Behan and a host of other fascinating painters such as Mary Fitzgerald, Celia Brennan, Frank Carty, Sarah Longley.

MORAG PRUNTY Writer Growing up second-generation Irish in London we were steeped in traditional Irish culture. My legs never took to Irish dancing but I knew all the Irish rebel songs and my brother played the tin whistle.

My fellow Irish Catholic schoolfriends and I came back from summers in Ireland eating Tayto and Kimberly biscuits. We felt we were part of a tribe, even though our Irish holiday friends called us English with our hee-haw accents - we so wanted to be fully fledged Irish.

When I finally moved to Ireland in my early 20s I realized how naff my Irish experience was to the urbane Dublin crowd I ran with, so I toned down my politics and my party pieces. So when Bill Whelan's Riverdance caused a stir at the Eurovision, I somehow felt my Irishness validated. It made Irish music and Irish dancing seem cool - with two second-generation Irish dancers the stars of the show. The drumming part still rouses in me a feeling of tribalism: a belonging.

DERVILLE MURPHY Group architect and art curator for Bank of Ireland On a political front, in the '70s and '80s, Robert Ballagh's works are very strong. His portrait of Charles Haughey represents Haughey three times - in a poster, the backdrop and as himself - and as a viewer you can sense he's trying to get something across, the megalomania of this particular statesman. It's quite tongue-incheek.

If you look at the spiritual, that's an important facet of Irish life and Louis Le Brocquy manages to portray the Irish interest in the spiritual in all his works, especially in his family series and in his head series. His work is quite timeless.

Younger artists are important too. Brian Maguire has tackled issues of social isolation and Mark O'Kelly's works portray our obsession with rampant materialism.

LYNNE PARKER Artistic director with Rough Magic theatre company The Millennium Bridge appeals to me because of it's beautiful design.

It is unpretentious and it is specifically designed for use by pedestrians and cyclists and it excludes the motor car. The river links north and south symbolically and and visually it seems very pleasing.

I just love the simplicity of the design and the fact there's no The Millennium Bridge in Dublin city great hoo-haa about it. It's not monumental, it's just pleasing and it does exactly what it's supposed to. It's a nod towards the Ha'penny bridge without imitating it. I think it's the way we should be thinking in terms of simplicity, function and aesthetic.

'Don Carlos' runs at the Project Arts Centre, Temple Bar until 25 March PAUL HOWARD Author I think the way that Irish people relate to each other has changed enormously in the past 10 years, especially since the emergence of all these new forms of communication. You can conduct friendships now without ever having to leave your livingroom, through the mediums of e-mail, SMS and Bebo. And people do.

David O'Doherty, the Irish stand-up comedian, has a song that hilariously captures the pratfalls involved in this new form of relationship - textual intercourse.

It's a work of genius called 'He Sent The Text Message To The Person Who The Text Message Was About'.

I saw him perform it at the Amnesty International comedy gig in Dublin in January in front of 2,000 people, every one of them silently thinking, "Shit, I've done that?" Amhran na bhFiann stopped doing it for me a long time ago.

What a great national anthem it would make for the new Celtic Tiger Ireland.

KAREN ARDIFF Actress and writer People living in Ireland approach culture in a totally new way now.

Good gigs don't stay a secret anymore. I was in a play recently that had its own MySpace, on which we posted blogs and got feedback from people who were at the show.

What word of mouth used to accomplish in a couple of weeks, the internet can do in a night.

For me, the North Strand Klezmer band strike a chord with what's going on culturally in contemporary Ireland. They're a Dublin band who play music from the Hasidic and Ashkenazic culture. I came across them by chance one night at a latenight bar in the centre of the city and it was one of the best nights of music and dancing of my life.

They were crammed into a corner of a tiny dance space that was packed with bodies, drenched with sweat from the frenzied dancing that is the only possible response to their electrifying sound. Now they are playing much larger venues, thankfully, but their effect on the audience is just the same.

They sum up everything that is vibrant and good in Irish culture right now and the hairs go up on the back of my neck as I remember the music.

MIKE FITZPATRICK Director of Limerick City Gallery of Art and curator of the Irish Pavilion at the 2007 Venice Biennale I read a review by Charles Isherwood in the New York Times recently of Brian Friel's Translations - which is on Broadway at the moment - and Isherwood makes an oblique reference to Iraq, in terms of one authority moving in over another. You could counterpoint that with how Ireland has shifted so radically in the 26 years since that play was written.

Before, we only had one set of visitors for 800 years and it was always about that power relationship with Britain. But in the last decade, suddenly there's this new context of many, many voices in Ireland. I'm curious as to the next five or 10 years, when some of those new voices begin to make work that comes out of Ireland. It's an exciting prospect. The Friel play is still fresh but it can be looked at in a totally different context now - what you call your home, how you define yourself, how you communicate.

In terms of art, I'm very focused on the work of Gerard Byrne, who is representing Ireland at this year's Venice Biennale. He takes historical documents and re-presents them, focusing on how memory alters and how we interpret the past. I think we're more sure about reflecting on the past now.

Before it was a very singular vision: there was only one reading of the past.

To be Irish today means, finally, not to be worried about it. What is Irishness? It can be anything, almost. It's wonderfully freeing not to have this monocultural Irishness. We're splintering, but equally we're reforming.

PAUL MCKINLEY Painter My parents were from Ireland but I grew up in Birmingham. I was always coming here on holidays as a child and always felt at home here. I've been living here since 1998 and, even in that short space of time, I've seen a massive change. There's so much more going on now, and more galleries showing work that wouldn't normally get shown. Even three years ago in Dublin, Gallery Four, Mother's Tankstation and The Lab didn't exist. There's the growth of spaces around the country too - the Millennium Court Arts Centre in Portadown, the Dock in Leitrim and the Model Arts Centre in Sligo. The thrust is looking beyond Ireland - and Mother's Tankstation in particular sums up that energy. The galleries and artists are much more outward-looking.

Everybody is raising their game.

Artists are not only making work for Irish audiences; they're making work for an international audience. Fergus Feehily is showing in Stuttgart and Cologne, for example, and there's the rise and rise of Eva Rothschild, who's showing in New York. They're really gaining a substantial reputation. And Nina Canell and Robin Watkins are Swedish but they're Irish-based. What they do is very interesting and it seems possible for them to maintain a European presence while being here.

Ireland is a lot more self-confident now and not over-awed or undermined by the international scene. It has the confidence to stand shoulder-to-shoulder.

Paul McKinley was selected by the Royal Hibernian Academy as the first artist in the new Nissan Art Project series. RHA exhibition from 16 March to 22 April BRENDAN MCCAUL Outgoing general manager of Buena Vista International (Ireland) The most obvious change you see in Ireland today is the number of new cinemas. They're going up because more people are going to movies and they're going because they're watching them in a much better environment. In 1990 there were about seven million cinema admissions in Ireland. By the end of last December they were up to 17.8 million in the Republic. Add in Northern Ireland and they're almost 23 million out of a population of 5.7 million. Hopefully it will continue.

In terms of product, I thought David Gleeson's The Front Line and John Boorman's The Tiger's Tail - two movies Buena Vista was involved in from a script stage - really reflected how Dublin is today. Personally I don't think audiences were ready to face up to entertainment in terms of immigration in the case of The Front Line, but David is a great talent with a wonderful eye. I think The Tiger's Tail was too close to the bone about the way we now live.

Yet in the cold light of things if someone dropped either script on my desk today, there's nothing I wouldn't do all over again.

We have another little musical romance by John Carney coming out in two weeks' time. It's called Once and won audience awards at Sundance and the Dublin Film Festival. It has great charm and I hope it will strike a chord of recognition.

PATRICK MCCABE Author First, the glittering toll bridge outside Ardee, which was just dandelions when I was a boy and stands steadfast and proud as a monument to the new age of science and possibility so long neglected in this country. Secondly, John Maher's novel The Luck Penny, which lyrically and intelligently anatomises the soul of an age not entirely dissimilar to our own, the mid-19th century, when the world shot forward at a spectacular rate of knots, ushering in coal and steel and cholera in the process. A story of the modern age in bygone times by a modern mind in touch with the future. Also, if I may, the artist Charles Cullen's unique rendering of Joyce's Ulysses, another modernist in consummate sympathy with the past and its complexity.

DIARMUID FERRITER Historian and broadcaster with RT� The William Dargan Bridge in Dundrum. Partly because it's so impressive looking, but with my historian's hat on it's an interesting link between the past and the present. Obviously the Luas involved opening up the tramlines that had been closed down in the early 1950s by Todd Andrews, because that was the original Harcourt Street line. And there's also a plaque on it dedicated to Dargan, who was the contractor in the 19th century for Ireland's first public railway. We had one of the most extensive railway systems in Europe in the 19th century, before they started closing it down of course. It's also the stop that is beside the new cathedral to unbridled consumerism which is the Dundrum town centre. As a structure it's very impressive; a lot of people were worried it would be some kind of monstrosity, but it's quite sleek, while being a bridge between the past and present Ireland.

RAYMOND KEANE Founding member and joint artistic director of Barabbas theatre company I'm going to cheat a little and pick three Irish artists - John Carson, John Kindness and Se�n Hillen.

Why they appeal to me is they have a sense of humour and a playfulness with Irish identity. For instance, my favourite John Kindness piece is a sculpture of a green harp. So you see it and think it's a bit twee, but when you get closer you see it's built from teenage mutant ninja turtles. It's a terrific funny play on Irishness, mixing ancient Ireland with our interest in American culture. Not much art makes you laugh, but this does. I think what links the three is that they find the extraordinary in the ordinary and have a great sense of humour. They look into the mundane and the silly and find profundity. Sometimes we need everyday life to be presented to us in a different way so we notice it again, and I think that helps us look at and analyse our own identity.

Barabbas theatre company presents '40 Songs of Green' at the National Concert Hall on 15 and 16 March at 8pm JOY GERRARD Artist These days, I live between Dublin and London. When I am home (Ireland is always home), I find myself looking at Dublin through the lens of the much larger, more frenetic London. In spite of Dublin's growth and expansion it is still calmer, quieter and always friendlier.

I often walk into and through the city centre and with this walking I clear a mental space for myself. In Brendan Kennellys' words in his poem 'Clearing a Space':

"A man should clear a space for himself Like Dublin city on a Sunday morning About six o'clock.

Dublin and myself are rid of our traffic then and I'm walking."

I too am surprised to find "a city is so like a man". There's a joy to this poem. It's beautifully observed and it is also a kind poem - both to the city and the insomniac poet finding respite from his sleeplessness. For me there's a personal nostalgia to this poem. It reminds me of how both a city and a person matures and changes.

Joy Gerrard has recently completed a major sculptural work for Galway City Museum BARRA HEAVEY of The Immediate, Choice Music Prize Nominee You're A Star weekly pits the nation's bluntest artistic gladiators against a partisan Irish public. Therein lies the programme's tensile beauty;

even the savviest cultural observer may joyously fail to identify which is which. This is thoroughly modern art: the selfpropagating, self-sustaining, multimedia symbiont, whose strength is derived from the piecemeal sapping of the manifold elements that constitute our national identity.

The reciprocal contribution, ironically, becomes a part of that identity. All the hopes and aspirations of the show's early contestants are posthumously subsumed in a series of Sunday night aesthetic s�ances and, for the vast majority, self-belief is obliterated right there in public, on screen. In an artistic volteface they then redouble their efforts outwardly by telephoning, by texting, as if this was the only voice they had left, as if the supreme effort of artistic production and subsequent critical failure had sufficiently twisted them into submission.

The contestants, bereft of conviction, seek reassurance from without in the truest, Irishest, way. Is this contingent commentary (suitably occurring on the Sabbath) simply our cultural identity's own way of internalising The Celtic Tiger?

"You're a star!" "It's grand, I already knew."

Compiled by Ciaran Carty , Pat Nugent, Quentin Fottrell, Una Mullally, Brenda McNally and Neil Dunphy SINEAD O'CONNOR Singer I've chosen some lines from the book of the (child) prophet Jeremiah, where the God character says: "They dress the wounds of my poor people as though they're nothing. Saying 'peace, peace' when there is no peace."

This encapsulates for me the unseen and unacknowledged truth of what is Ireland now. The wounds which we know exist but pretend we don't see.

Amongst which is the massive chasm which exists between those who call themselves better off and those who have barely a little more than nothing, if they're lucky.

It reminds me of how we were taught, when I was younger, that the war being over was all Ireland needed in order to be prosperous and happy.

So that our aspirations were limited and we never strove yet for real peace - the kind which comes from knowing that those considered less fortunate among us are being supported and valued.

It also makes me think of all the people from other races who have come to our shores looking for what we said we had to offer - which was peace. Some have found welcome and respect but lots have not. And I have friends who have been spat on in the street by Irish people, for being what God made them.

And my poor friends had been imagining they might meet leprechauns. . .

TWENTY MAJOR Winner of Best Blog at the Irish Blog Awards 2007 THE idea that Cecilia Ahern's first book spawned million-euro advances and film companies couldn't wait to snap it up says everything about the state of Irish fiction at the moment.

One or two exceptions apart, it's all tediously safe, formulaic and fluffy.

It's like a toilet seat with one of those furry covers on it. Looks nice on the outside but under the cover it's full of. . . .

That's no real criticism of Cecilia - she's dead right to milk it for all its worth, but it's a bit sad that a country with such a rich literary history is not producing much of note at the moment. Then, to counter it, stuff like The Sea by John Banville is lauded as great work when it's as tedious and up its own arse as the chick-lit stuff.

Now we'll have a PS I Love You movie, merchandise, a spin off TV series starring Angeline Ball and eventually we'll have Chick-lit Idol to find the next Cecilia while the real talent remains ignored and underpaid.

MYLES DUNGAN Author and former arts presenter The pessimist in me worries that the work which most captures the Celtic Tiger Ireland of plenty and prosperity is Dorothy Cross's emblematic Ghost Ship.

One day it just materialised in D�n Laoghaire harbour, was marvelled at for its imagination and novelty, briefly became a familiar part of the landscape and then was gone as suddenly as it had appeared.

But for something that encapsulates a greater sense of permanence, Croke Park it has to be, a work of art and a functioning public space. Architecturally ambitious it has managed to avoid the Irish tendency to save a few bob and in doing so to completely devalue what could have been magnificent or at least efficient. It is more in keeping with the National Gallery extension than the M50. It was built on something resembling the meitheal principle.

Despite the presence of corporate boxes it was constructed by an organisation with its roots in everyday Irish life and funded on the back of popular collaboration. Admittedly the government came along with the combine harvester but in my innocence I still like to believe that government reflects the will of the people.

With all due credit to the likes of architectural firm Gilroy McMahon, it is a project which has been driven by someone possessing one of the great Irish virtues - self-effacement. Liam Mulvihill has, thankfully, yet to learn the meaning of the term "self publicist". When he finally retires we should make this modest moderniser president and I don't mean uachtar�n Cumann Luthcleas Gael.

Myles Dungan's latest book, 'How The Irish Won The West', will be released in paperback in May, �14.95