Why Ireland is paying its artists to create

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Ireland has a deep-seated reverence for the arts. No Oscar and Booker Prize nomination seems complete without an Irish name or two, or three — something the country almost takes for granted. Now the government is getting creative itself: by paying artists to do their work.

After a successful pilot, a Basic Income for the Arts scheme will be launched next year, paying €325 a week to 2,000 eligible artists.

The money comes with no strings attached. “They don’t need to know if you succeed or fail,” says musician Alison O’Donnell, 73, who was one of the recipients of the weekly stipend in the three-year pilot phase that ends in February. “It’s all about creativity.”

Writers, actors, musicians, painters, dancers, designers — you name it, the Celtic nation has them. At a dinner when I first visited Dublin three decades ago, everyone at the table was called upon to recite a poem, tell a story, share a joke or sing. No one wavered. Events at my daughter’s state secondary school are all punctuated by a poem or song.

Fostering creative talent happens by design, not chance. James Shapiro, a professor at Columbia University, attributed the glut of Irish writers on the longlist when he was a Booker judge in 2023 (there were four Irish authors and one of them, Paul Lynch, won) to a “return on investment. Ireland has invested in its writers, especially young writers”.

According to the government, the pilot scheme also delivered: it shelled out €114mn over the three years but after tax payments and savings on benefits, the total cost was €72mn and for every €1 of public money, it says the return to society was €1.39. It claims that this could reach €1.43 in the permanent scheme. The returns were calculated in terms of higher productivity in the sector, greater public engagement with the arts and improved psychological wellbeing among creative workers.

That might feel intangible, but most people in Ireland would have no argument with art being good for society. And with a forecast €10.2bn budget surplus this year, the country is in the happy position of having cash to splash.

Still, some creatives believe the bursary could pay higher dividends by being more targeted — perhaps requiring a writer to have won a competition. One former senior arts official, who asked not to be named, also wondered if a state handout would “mute” an artist’s ability to challenge the government.

For others, art has to be its own reward. “Only a tiny, tiny, tiny group of people become very successful,” says Conor McAnally, chair of the Irish Writers’ Union. Paying creatives to create “stops you having to work three jobs”, he adds. Indeed McAnally calls himself a “writer, journalist, producer, director, actor, storyteller, racing-car driver, skydiver [and] former motorcycle rider”.

The Irish government has yet to publish details of the permanent programme but the culture ministry said the pilot had been “central to the resurgence in Irish arts — the so-called “Green Wave” — seen in recent years”.

For Sarah Glennie, director of Ireland’s National College of Art and Design, “there can be a tendency in Ireland to celebrate the past — this is absolutely about investing in the future”. More importantly, she said, giving creatives a salary will “broaden the [socio-economic] base of people who can be artists — this could be a real game changer”.

Even the opposition party Sinn Féin has applauded the incentive. Aengus Ó Snodaigh, its arts and culture spokesperson, says “in some ways, it’s going back to medieval times . . . when there was patronage for artists”.

He has sponsored a bill to win explicit recognition of comedy in law; the 2003 Arts Act does not (although comedians were allowed to apply for the basic income pilot). The government agrees, but wants the fix to be part of a wider reform of the Arts Council, which ran into trouble this year after it emerged it had spent €7mn on a botched IT system.

Ultimately “you do need money to go into art — you risk an awful, awful lot”, says Seán Finegan of hit comedy trio Foil Arms and Hog, which missed out on state support because comedy was not recognised. He says their gamble has paid off, but “it would be great to see more people being able to gamble on it.”

jude.webber@ft.com