Ireland's basic income for artists changed my life. Other people deserve the same luck | Caelainn Hogan

3 hours ago 5

I won the lottery. Out of around 8,000 artists, my name was randomly chosen to be one of the 2,000 who the Irish government would pay a basic income. This pilot scheme was a test of whether a policy of supporting artists would pay off in terms of creative work, wellbeing and, calculated down to the cent, the money that society would make back.

For three years, we were paid €325 a week with no strings attached, other than filling out a survey. We could continue earning and applying for artist grants. I am a freelance writer who, like most artists, has always had to work outside my creative focus to afford to live, constantly worrying I will never be able to afford a home myself or to start a family. As such, the basic income was life-changing.

Only months into the scheme, I found out I was pregnant. The basic income helped me decide to have my baby, knowing I could continue creative work and keep my small studio space in a light-filled warehouse in the heart of Dublin. The Back Loft, one of the few affordable spaces left for artists, is a strong community of visual artists, musicians, writers, tattooists and knitters.

The basic income gave me more freedom to experiment in my work, to write for independent publications and engage with community initiatives. I helped to create events that brought together artists across forms and raised money for a local rape crisis centre.

The collective successes of the pilot resulted in the Irish government’s decision to launch a permanent basic income for the arts scheme, opening this May. It turned out that artists on the pilot made back millions. The state’s own research found that for every euro the government spent on supporting artists, society received €1.39 in return, and the scheme was estimated to have generated more than €100m in social and economic benefits.

The pilot also highlighted the systemic precarity of the creative sector and what that does to artists’ mental health and livelihoods, which the basic income significantly alleviated. Yet despite the scheme paying for itself, the Irish government has decided not to expand it to all artists, promising it to only a few thousand, limited to three-year cycles and with mandated three-year gaps.

On a wall in my studio, I have an image by a young photographer who I collaborated with throughout my time on basic income, support she did not receive. Only a fraction of the artists in my studios might be supported by the state to do creative work under the new scheme, while the rest struggle to make ends meet in a city where the housing crisis disproportionately affects people in precarious work such as ours. I’m lucky to have a partner who now owns the home we live in, but many artists I know lack this security.

With our futures increasingly uncertain amid international crises, funding art might seem superficial. But creative work offers new understandings of the world, strengthening communities and speaking important truths.

I will apply for the new permanent scheme. Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. But should a basic income for the arts feel like a gift horse and operate like a lottery? While Ireland calls itself a “global leader” for making basic income for the arts permanent, the scheme risks reinforcing precarity.

Ireland will take over the EU’s rotating presidency this year and it claims that other member states have consulted Dublin on replicating this experiment. But successive Irish governments have deepened inequality and precarity in the country over many years.

Before introducing this scheme, Ireland ranked among the lowest in the 27 countries of the EU for spending on culture. In 2022, that amounted to €897m, or 0.2% of GDP, compared with an EU average of 0.5%. A basic income for 2,000 artists increases Ireland’s spending by only about €35m a year, which would be offset by economic gains. The National Campaign for the Arts says the basic income needs to be dramatically expanded. Praxis, the artists’ union of Ireland, supports the expansion of the permanent scheme but warns that elements of it “risk reproducing precarity rather than addressing it”. Disabled artists, for instance, could face – because of welfare threshold means-testing – having their social protection payments significantly reduced if they accept the basic income.

The basic income ended for me just as the new scheme was announced. I might not win the lottery next time. Or I could end up getting the support for nine out of 12 years, from the start of the pilot, while another artist receives nothing. I know of young creative people forced to sleep in the streets due to the housing crisis who might not be able to apply. We still don’t know what the eligibility requirements will be for the permanent scheme.

If basic income for the arts pays for itself, and I know the relief and creative freedom it brings, expand it to all. While people on welfare in Ireland still face stigma, artists seem to have a cultural capital the government is happy to cash in on. But the government should remember that as artists, we are in a unique position to highlight inequality and the evident lack of political will to ensure all people are free from precarity – even if it wants to paint us as biting the hand that feeds.