I hardly read Irish writers any more, I've been disappointed so often... The older, more sophisticated Irish writers that want to be Nabokov give me the yellow squirts and a scaldy hole. If there is a movement in Ireland, it is backwards. Novel after novel set in the nineteen seventies, sixties, fifties. Reading award-winning Irish literary fiction, you wouldn't know television had been invented. Indeed, they seem apologetic about acknowledging electricity (or "the new Mechanikal Galvinism" as they like to call it).

IT'S tempting to quote all 1,800 words of Julian Gough's (year-old) answer to a mild-mannered question put to him about contemporary Irish fiction by his publisher. But then you'd miss his equally entertaining, and provocative, responses to questions on translation, European fiction and publishing in Ireland. So head over to his site and read the whole thing. (Mr Gough is an Irish writer himself, though lives in Berlin.)

I don't read enough Irish fiction to know if Mr Gough's claims are true. But during a recent trip to Ireland to research a piece on the country's mood after the crash and EU/IMF bail-out, I was struck by what little impact Ireland's boom and subsequent bust seemed to have had on the domestic arts.

This, remember, was a truly extraordinary story. The plot follows a satisfying rags-to-riches-to-rags narrative arc, with enough hubris and nemesis to satisfy the most demanding classicist. The cast of characters is superlative, featuring buccaneering bankers, outsized politicians and all-conquering property developers (plus a few poor Cassandras). Even the locations are enticing, from rural beauty spots blighted by "ghost estates" to high-end networking jamborees masquerading as racing events.

You'd expect this sorry tale to have generated a wave of films, plays and novels. After all, the Irish have never shied away from telling stories about themselves. Visual artists must have hit upon a new mode of expression. Musicians, surely, would have found a way to express the story through song, as they have done with so many of Ireland's historical traumas. Hell, this story could make an opera.

But there is little sign of an artistic response to Ireland's crash. In Dublin, I saw a production of John B Keane's "The Field", a 1965 play about a land dispute in south-west Ireland. (It was excellent; readers who happen to find themselves in County Mayo between Tuesday and Thursday next week should check it out).

The play was about a very different time in Irish history, but a few lines happened to resonate with more recent events—"There's a craze for land everywhere!", for instance. These invariably drew hearty chuckles from the audience, suggesting an appetite for some kind of dramatic interpretation of the Celtic Tiger years. But one of the producers told me that they had decided to re-stage the play before Ireland came bumping down to earth; the fact that parts of the script now sounded like a description of recent years was a (happy) coincidence.

That was about it. I spotted no exhibitions devoted to depictions of the new misery wrought on Irish lives, heard no songs expressing the anxiety and uncertainty that is so palpable in the country at large. I spent one delightful night in a small-town pub surrounded by enthusiastically warbling songsters and songstresses, but their repertoire did not seem to extend to anything more recent than the Easter Rising. (Although I am told that YouTube is dripping with home-made "bail-out songs".) An admittedly cursory scan through the programme of the Irish Film Festival, which began yesterday, throws up work devoted to the war in Croatia and ethnic tensions in Burma, but little on the drama at home. (Readers will no doubt be kind enough to point me in the direction of any works that have escaped my notice.)

As for novels, the journey from conception to publication can be long, often longer than the two-and-a-bit years since the Irish government decided to guarantee the debts of the country's rapidly collapsing banks, the first big sign that Ireland's landing was not going to be soft. So perhaps we can expect a wave of recession-lit in the coming years. Anne Enright (pictured), author of the Booker-winning "The Gathering", told me that her next novel is set in February 2009, a strange, limbo time when nobody realised how quickly the country was falling into recession.

But I'm not sure. Ireland has had the best part of 20 years to produce a novel that captured the exciting, sometimes frenzied mood of a country undergoing momentous economic and social change. If it's been written, people don't appear to have bought it. Much of the Irish literature that has populated the bookshops and the bestseller lists in that time has been of the Frank McCourt-style "misery memoir" type: sorry autobiographical or semi-autobiographical tales of poverty, domestic violence and abuse of various licit or illicit substances.

Why might this be? Ireland is certainly not lacking a distinguished literary history. In "Ship of Fools", his polemical response to Ireland's crash and the people that caused it, Fintan O'Toole, a well-known Irish journalist and critic, suggests that Ireland lacked the tradition of forensic social realism needed to deal with a chaotic period like the years of the Celtic Tiger. When I put this to Ms Enright, she agreed, sort of, but suggested that this was a natural consequence of Ireland's history, specifically the fact that it never underwent a genuine industrial revolution. "We can't produce a George Eliot any more than we can a steam railway," she said.

Kevin Barry, another author I met, told me that Irish literature was "weirdly retrospective". This may, he suggested, have something to do with the fact that Ireland in effect "skipped the 20th century"—it transformed itself from a poor, largely agricultural economy into a high-tech export-intensive powerhouse in less than a generation. Mr Barry said he was "not rubbing his hands with glee" at the prospect of the epic Irish social novel. His soon-to-be published debut novel, "City of Bohane", is a "Clockwork Orange"-style dystopia set in a fictional Irish town in 2054. (If it's half as good as his New Yorker short story from last year, it'll be worth reading.)

Mr O'Toole also draws attention to a couple of crime novels, "small masterpieces" he says do a good job of depicting Ireland's "globalised culture". In that vein I should mention that a couple of friends have recommended Alan Glynn's "Winterland" as painting an accurate portrait of the seamy side of Ireland's boom.

One more thought. Although Ireland's top-flight novelists have tended not to tackle the big story of their country's recent history in their fiction—at least not directly—they have proved willing to express their thoughts in other media. Ms Enright has taken to the pages of the London Review of Books to describe, compellingly, the recession. After last November's bail-out, amid much talk about Ireland's humiliating loss of sovereignty Colm Tóibin provided British radio listeners with three minutes of wisdom and common sense. A week earlier John Banville, another Booker winner, struck a slightly more melancholy tone in the New York Times.

I may be wrong, but I'm not sure that there are many other countries which outsiders would turn to novelists to explain. It helps, of course, that the Irish speak English. But were Australia's economy to collapse, or Canada's banks to buckle (unlikely, I know), I don't imagine newspaper editors would solicit op-eds from Tim Winton or Alice Munro. Readers can correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't recall major cultural figures from Greece or Portugal cropping up in mainstream media outlets to describe their countries' respective woes.

Why might this be? I think there may be supply and demand reasons. On the supply side, Ireland is a small, proud country with a long history of telling its story to the world. It has treated its literary children well; perhaps they are considered to have earned their place as narrators and so feel confident about acting out that role on the international stage. (This, of course, makes the absence of fictional responses to the crash even odder.) On the demand side, many of us hold tight to outdated notions of Ireland as a romantic sort of place that only the artist can really understand. Even in the form of newspaper articles, the novelist's response, we suspect, will take us beyond the deathly analyses of economists and historians and uncover the true soul of the place.