Basic Incomes and Saving The Arts - it's all about the money

 There is something undoubtedly attractive about the proposition that Northern Ireland should follow the Republic in establishing a Basic Income for Artists. In a sector characterised by precarious employment, intermittent income and chronic underinvestment, the prospect of providing greater financial security to artists is hardly something I would instinctively oppose. 

But the proposition now being advanced, through the endeavours of Independent Councillor Paul Doherty and Green Party Councillors Áine Groogan and Anthony Flynn, deserves rather more examination than its attractive headline has so far received.

The Republic’s extended scheme will provide 2,000 eligible artists and creative practitioners with €325 per week. On a broadly population-equivalent basis, that would suggest c.700 places in Northern Ireland, costing approximately £10.3m annually.

That is a very considerable intervention in the context of arts funding here.

And, as advocacy would have it, another campaign is today making almost precisely the point which complicates the proposition.

I joined Equity members, artists and arts workers are at Stormont  today protesting against the chronic underfunding of the arts and expressing no confidence in Communities Minister Gordon Lyons. They are demanding the long-promised Arts Policy and pointing to ACNI’s assessment that it requires £21.27m in resource for 2026/27 to stabilise core infrastructure, strengthen support for individual artists and improve organisational capacity. There were great chats and well-articulated anger about the plight of the arts. 

And of course, I have complete sympathy with all campaigns that try to save the arts locally. But the situation DfC and the rest of us find ourselves in is complex ... and as ever cash is king. 

The Minister did produce the somewhat slight Heritage, Culture and Creativity Framework last year, but nothing resembling a substantive Arts Policy, or indeed the investment required to deliver one, has followed.

And the clock is now running down on this Assembly mandate.

Even were Minister Lyons to bring forward a substantive Arts Policy in the coming months, with outcomes, measures and some credible means of delivering greater sustainability, there is precious little political runway left in which to implement it.

A policy document is not, after all, an arts policy in practice.

It has to be resourced. Programmes have to be developed. Outcomes and measures have to be established. Funding decisions have to follow. And all of this would now be happening as the present Assembly moves towards the end of its mandate.

So the increasingly plausible prospect is that we will enter another election having finally acquired, at best, a policy document but without the resources or implementation necessary to make much difference.

And then we wait again.

A new Assembly, a new Executive, perhaps a new Minister, another budget process and another set of political priorities. It is hardly unreasonable to wonder whether we could be another year from seeing anything substantive actually emerge for the arts in the North.

That makes today’s Equity protest particularly pertinent.

Because ACNI’s opening resource allocation in 2025/26 was only a little over £10m. Its stated resource requirement for 2026/27 is £21.27m.

So the existing arts ecology needs £10m-plus more before we even begin considering another £10.3m for BIA.

And that, surely, is where this discussion has to begin.

The Republic has not introduced BIA into an arts ecology funded at Northern Ireland levels. Its Arts Council operates with substantially greater public investment per head, before the additional investment in BIA is even considered.

Northern Ireland, meanwhile, has yet to provide anything approaching sustainable stability. Arts organisations cling on by their fingertips, even being asked this year to model the consequences of a further 5% reduction.

So, if the Executive were to even contemplate finding c.£10.3m annually for BIA, it must surely first address the c.£10m-plus additional investment already required by ACNI to sustain the organisations, programmes and existing artist supports upon which artistic careers depend.

Otherwise we risk having a conversation about artists’ incomes detached entirely from the economy in which artists actually work.

There is a further difficulty.

A population-equivalent scheme would provide only around 700 places on an equivalent Basic Income scheme in the North. (5.5m compared to 1.9m in NI). We know from the experience of Covid support alone that Northern Ireland’s artistic and creative workforce numbers in the thousands. 

The Republic deals with oversubscription amongst eligible applicants through random selection — in other words, a lottery.

Councillor Doherty’s original motion sought a scheme modelled on the Republic’s programme. Councillors Groogan and Flynn subsequently succeeded in amending it to broaden its scope to eligible artists and creative workers. The Council ultimately resolved to call upon the Executive to legislate for and fund such a scheme.  That may broaden access, but it doesn’t increase the number of places. It broadens the pool from which those c.700 recipients would ultimately be selected. There are in excess of 3,000 eligible artists and creatives, at least there were during Covid. 

And , just to be pedantic about it, this is not a Basic Income for Artists. It is a time-limited stipend for a randomly selected proportion of those considered eligible — rather like winning the lottery, for a while. And indeed, winning the lottery for many artists and creative producers would indeed amount to some regular support, say £1,225 every month. 

There is another question which I think requires rather more attention: what would BIA mean for the individual artist supports we already have here in the North?

ACNI already operates a suite of programmes intended to develop artistic practice and careers. They support artists to make new work, undertake research and development, access mentoring and training, develop internationally and pursue more ambitious creative work.

These are already modest and fiercely competitive resources. I know because CAP administers the Anne O’Donoghue Award on ACNI’s behalf: a modest but potentially career-enhancing £5,000 award. It is not an income replacement, nor is it intended to be. It is targeted support designed to help an arts manager or producer develop their practice and career.

Project Funding for Individuals, meanwhile, offers awards between £3,000 and £10,000. At the upper end sits the Major Individual Artist Award: just four awards of £15,000 are available in 2026/27, intended for established artists of national or international standing undertaking substantial and ambitious work in Northern Ireland.

Now compare that with BIA.

The annual value of the Republic’s payment is approximately £14,700 at our working exchange rate.

What becomes of the financial and developmental value of existing awards of £3,000, £5,000 or £10,000 when a randomly selected BIA recipient receives almost £15,000 as income support?

And what happens to the Major Individual Artist Award when its £15,000 value is almost precisely the same as the annual BIA payment?

The purposes are different, of course. That is precisely the point.

One provides income security. The others enable particular artistic development, new work, international opportunity and significant progression in an artist’s practice.

BIA does not make any of those purposes disappear.

If anything, introducing an income payment of that scale would surely require us to reconsider the value of the existing awards alongside it. Otherwise we could arrive at the peculiar position where the largest developmental award ACNI can make to one of Northern Ireland’s leading artists is virtually identical in cash terms to a randomly allocated annual income payment.

And that is the nub of it - the scale and depth of the arts in Northern Ireland has been so curtailed by the issue of insufficient revenue funding that so many aspects of our work as practitioners hits a ceiling that other jurisdictions can grow well beyond. Historically, we have inherited a woefully underfunded circumstance and it has only beome worse over time. So reconsidering any awards upwards requires still more the absolute basic of money.

Which brings us back, inevitably, to resources.

None of this is an argument against paying artists properly. CAP has spent decades arguing precisely for that.

It is an argument that artists cannot be separated from the ecology which enables them to practise.

Artists require organisations to commission them, venues to present them, programmes to employ them, publishers to publish them and audiences and communities with whom to work. The wider “creative workers” envisaged by the Council motion are no less dependent upon that infrastructure.

And that infrastructure is already seriously underfunded.

National Lottery funding provided £5.82m — almost 42% — of ACNI’s £13.97m Annual Funding Programme in 2025/26, quite apart from the other individual and project programmes it supports. What was conceived as additional funding has become integral to maintaining the system itself.

There is an irony here too with the City Council BIA proposal.

Councillor Doherty’s original motion clearly recognises the long-standing underinvestment in the arts and, quite properly, calls upon the Executive to fund BIA rather than suggesting that it should somehow be extracted from existing arts resources. (Belfast City Minutes)

But perhaps that recognition should lead him and his erstwhile party colleagues, first to press harder on the demonstrable underinvestment we already know exists.

And closer to home, there is yet a further issue . 

Arts organisations supported through Belfast City Council’s own funding programmes are confronting significant reductions and continuing uncertainty. Some are facing reductions approaching 50%.

It is therefore a little difficult to call upon Stormont to find millions in recurring expenditure for artists while hard-pressed arts organisations in Cllr Doherty's own city face the prospect of substantial reductions in support from the Council. 

That is not to suggest that Councillor Doherty had any hand in those proposed reductions, nor is it an argument for choosing organisations over artists.

It is simply to recognise the obvious: they inhabit the same ecology.

The artist whose income we quite properly worry about still needs somewhere to work. Someone has to commission the work, employ the facilitator, produce the performance, run the venue, organise the festival, publish the writing or bring the artist into a school or community.

Those organisations are not some administrative layer sitting between public money and artists. Much of the time they are precisely how public money becomes paid work for artists.

So perhaps some of the political energy now being invested in creating a new income scheme might also be directed towards ensuring that the existing cultural infrastructure — at Stormont and at Belfast City Hall — is adequately funded in the first place. And there are other options that could be explored, some revenue-neutral.

Which leaves us still with some fairly stark arithmetic.

Something in excess of £10m additional recurring resource is already required simply to bring ACNI towards the £21.27m it says it needs.

A population-equivalent BIA requires approximately another £10.3m every year.

And that is before we consider the inevitable implications for the existing individual artist awards and programmes sitting alongside it.

So this is not really a proposition for a £10m Basic Income for Artists up here at this time.

But it may be the beginning of a concerted and frank discussion about the need for more than £20m of additional recurring public investment in the arts in Northern Ireland, if we are to begin to approach levels of funding enjoyed elsewhere in these islands. 

And I would very much welcome that discussion and there were some terrifically optimistic exchanges today between arts reps and MLAs. ArtsMatterNI would welcome any role in extending those conversations right now.  Indeed, judging by the artists and theatre folk shouting "Save The Arts" outside Stormont today, quite a lot of us would.

That is the discussion we should actually be having.

The Republic has demonstrated an ambition to support artists through BIA. It has also demonstrated an ambition to fund and strengthen the arts infrastructure within which those artists work.

If we in the North wish to emulate one, we cannot reasonably continue to ignore the other.

Fleadh-bergasted – and thinking about what comes next

It is difficult to overstate the scale and ambition of the Fleadh.

For eight days, until next Sunday, Belfast has become one big cultural stage. Music and songs spill from concert halls into pubs, venues, street corners, hotels and public spaces. Formal performances sit alongside impromptu sessions. Competitors arrive from across Ireland and around the world to take part in traditional music, song, dance and language competitions, while audiences wander through a programme of more than 200 events spread across venues and neighbourhoods.

There are great performers and emerging talents; children carrying instruments as big as themselves and players whose mastery has been shaped across lifetimes. There are concerts, céilis, workshops, competitions, gigs on the street, seisiún and new musical connections that can only happen when musicians find one another. Friendships will be made and songs will be written. 

The range is truly breathtaking, almost overwhelming in fact.

Way more than a festival, the Fleadh is like a temporary cultural townland within a city: participatory, intergenerational, intercontinental and diverse. This week, the distinction between performer and audience starts to blur. The music isn’t confined to the main stage. It appears around the next corner, down an alley, or in venues, big and small. 

It is a remarkable logistical and cultural undertaking. Belfast City Council, Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann, Ards CCÉ and a network of partners, venues, performers, workers and volunteers have attempted something enormously ambitious. They have not simply brought a large event to Belfast; they have allowed the Fleadh to occupy the city, opening it to visitors while encouraging residents and communities to see themselves within it.

The emphasis upon accessibility, families, local activity and cross-community participation matters too. Belfast’s musical and cultural identity is complicated, rich and of course drawn from more than one tradition. The wider programme has sought to reflect that. Maith thú 

It is, in the fullest and most complimentary sense of the word, Fleadh-bergasting.

And the impact may be breathtaking as well.

According to Belfast City Council; around 800,000 visitors are expected to experience the event, with an estimated £53 million in economic benefit anticipated (says DfI in the Irish News).   Hotels, restaurants, pubs, shops, taxis and transport, will all enjoy the effect. The world is tuning in. My uncle contacted me this morning from Australia having watched the news  - he left Belfast decades ago and whilst he has visited regularly, to him, after seeing the Fleadh on his tv in Sydney,  “Belfast is unrecognisable”. I did reassure him that there was still plenty he would remember, but that powerful message is being broadcast to the globe. 

That is unquestionably something to celebrate.

But, (isn’t there always), amid all the music, bustle and entirely justified civic pride, it is worth sparing a thought for the arts organisations in the same city facing funding stagnation and, in some cases, substantial cuts.

The Fleadh does not arrive in a cultural vacuum. When civic cultural managers were bidding for the event, they understood that there was a supportive cultural environment in the city for just such an event. They were undoubtedly confident that sufficient infrastructure was there. And so they programmed accordingly. The wider programme surrounding the Fleadh offers a vibrant representation of not only Belfast but the region’s cultural life: artists, musicians, venues, community organisations, producers, technicians, teachers, volunteers and audiences. The programme draws upon relationships, knowledge and creative practices developed patiently over many years. It can represent and amplify that ecosystem wonderfully, but the Fleadh itself, for all its substantial presence, cannot create or invent it.

And that ecosystem is under considerable pressure.

Many arts organisations have been held in a funding limbo since 2010. Standstill government funding since then has translated into real term cuts, while the costs of salaries, utilities, insurance, buildings and artistic production have continued to rise. Some long-established Belfast organisations are now facing further substantial cuts from the Council at precisely the moment the city is celebrating the scale, vibrancy and economic power of culture.

That seems counterintuitive doesn’t it? 

Now, this is emphatically not an argument against the Fleadh. Belfast should host it. And indeed next year, it promises to be even better. We should enjoy it, support it and recognise the sheer effort involved in bringing an opportunity of this magnitude to the city. Nor should this become another wearisome contest between major events and year-round arts provision. A culturally confident city requires both.

The question is what happens next…

If culture can generate an estimated £53 million for the wider economy in a single extraordinary week, surely the time has come to consider how some of that value can flow back into the cultural ecosystem itself.

The economic benefit will not arrive as a single cheque in the City Hall postbox. It will be felt across hospitality, accommodation, transport, retail and the rest. But public policy can still recognise where that value begins and where it could be most impactful. A meaningful Fleadh legacy could include renewed and sustained investment in the artists, organisations, venues and communities that provide the platform for Belfast to be capable of hosting such events, but also supporting our diverse community of creativity and participation. 

The Fleadh will leave behind memories, friendships, inspiration, new musical discoveries and, very likely, more than a few sore heads!  But its legacy could be greater still. It could pinpoint another moment when Belfast more fully appreciates that cultural vibrancy does not suddenly appear when the banners go up, the stages arrive and the television cameras roll.

It is created and sustained throughout the year—often quietly, and on increasingly precarious resources—by an artistic community working in venues, meanwhile or temporary spaces, schools, studios, parish halls and neighbourhoods across the city.

So enjoy every minute of this extraordinary Fleadh.

But when the last seisiún finishes and the instrument cases finally close, let us ensure that the cultural life so magnificently represented throughout this week is supported to flourish long after the crowds have gone home.

The Arts Matter. Stop the Cuts. Fund the Arts.

Don't Scrap the Play Resource Warehouse - a plea and petition

I was genuinely saddened to hear that Bryson House Arts & Play Scrap Store is to close this June.
Because this is not just the loss of a warehouse.

For decades, the Scrap Store at the Play Resource Warehouse has been one of those rare pieces of civic and creative infrastructure that quietly made creativity more accessible. And for a nominal fee or annual membership, teachers, youth workers, artists, arts organisations, community groups and facilitators could walk through its doors and leave with the raw materials for workshops, projects, festivals, school activities, play sessions and ideas that otherwise may never have happened.  And help the planet at the same time. Because we know, not everything needs to be new. 

Part of the quiet brilliance of the Scrap Store was that it challenged the depressingly widespread disposable consumer culture.  It recognised that imagination does not begin with pristine materials arriving in plastic packaging. Often, it begins with remnants, offcuts, unwanted party-favours and promotional objects and the unexpected textures on discarded rolls of wallpaper,  all waiting to be transformed into something else entirely. One person’s recycling became somebody else’s puppet, sculpture, costume, workshop, theatre set, sensory resource or school project.

That was not simply economical. It was imaginative, environmental, sustainable and humane.
And at a time when schools, arts organisations and community groups are already under enormous financial strain, this closure will simply force many people to spend more money on materials they previously could access affordably and sustainably. 

The Scrap Store helped stretch tiny budgets even further. It allowed facilitators, teachers and artists to experiment and create ambitiously without constantly worrying about retail costs. It allowed this creative activity to flourish sustainably - ethically. A tub of plastic bottle tops, or corporate cast-off printed bags would be destined for a melting down or landfill. But in the hands of artists and participants, they represent creative possibilities, underpinned by a quiet, practical education about recycling and reusing materials and things.  In a place where arts, education and community sectors are continually expected to absorb rising costs with diminishing support, resources like this quietly made participation possible. Today, that matters more and more. And for tomorrow, it's absolutely crucial. 

What makes this proposed closure even more striking is how rare places like Play Resource are across these islands. A scattered network of a handful of scrapstores and creative reuse centres exists across Britain. On the island of Ireland there appears to be only one broadly comparable operation remaining: ReCreate in Dublin. Significantly, groups from Dublin reportedly travelled to Belfast years ago to learn from the Play Resource model developed here. Cork has been trying to establish a scrap store for years. 
So this is not some eccentric side project with little relevance beyond a niche audience. It remains, for this month anyway, a pioneering infrastructure that we can ill-afford to lose.

Many in the arts and community sectors will remember previous campaigns more than a decade ago to protect the Play Resource Centre from closure. People rallied then because they understood something important: once infrastructures like this disappear, they are exceptionally difficult to rebuild.
It is also impossible not to think of Anne O’Donoghue at this moment. Anne was instrumental in establishing the Play Resource Warehouse and understood, long before many others did, the extraordinary social, creative and environmental value held within reusing and recycling, participation and making materials sustainable and accessible. Through the Anne O’Donoghue Award, delivered by Community Arts Partnership on behalf of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, that legacy continues to be recognised today. Which perhaps explains why this news lands so heavily for so many people. 
There is also a wider contradiction here that is difficult to ignore. Bryson House, which swept in to assist Play Resource some years ago, publicly states that part of its charitable purpose is promoting:
 “waste reduction, re-use reclamation, recycling, use of recycled products”
and:
“advancing the education of the public about all aspects of waste generation, waste management and waste recycling”.

Meanwhile, Belfast City Council’s cultural strategy, A City Imagining, speaks about “sustaining and strengthening the city’s cultural ecosystem” while recognising “the increasing importance of environmental responsibility to the lives of the people in the city”.

Yet here we are discussing the possible disappearance of one of the clearest practical examples of those principles in action anywhere in Belfast. Because the Scrap Store is not separate from recycling policy or cultural policy. It sits precisely at the intersection of both.

This was circular economy thinking made tangible, on our doorstep:
materials diverted from waste streams and reimagined through education, creativity, play and community participation.

And it raises an important question not only for Bryson, but for Belfast itself.
If substantial public investment already exists around kerbside recycling, waste management and environmental infrastructure, should part of that same civic ambition not involve protecting and strengthening the community reuse initiatives that give those policies real visible value?
Surely one of the strongest demonstrations of a circular economy is not simply collecting waste more efficiently, but enabling communities, schools and young people to creatively transform what would otherwise be thrown away.

There is also a deeper anxiety sitting beneath all of thisWe have seen important specialist community infrastructures struggle over the years, sometimes rescued temporarily through the intervention of larger bodies acting in good faith and under difficult circumstances, only for the original institution or organisation not survive over the longer term. The experience of An Munia Tober , the Travellers' Resource Centre, may inevitably linger in the background for many people involved in community and cultural work here.

That history may also shape how people respond to news like this. Because while the Scrap Store may represent only a relatively small component within the wider machinery of the Bryson Charitable Group operation, its impact extends far beyond its direct operating costs. The value it generates is dispersed across schools, arts organisations, youth services, community groups, facilitators and families throughout Northern Ireland.

And if it disappears, the pressures do not disappear with it. They are simply transferred to sectors already struggling with constrained budgets, rising costs and continuing uncertainty around public investment. Without the scale or experience to make recycling accessible or at all sustainable.
That is why this feels larger than the closure of a single programme. Because creative life does not only depend on major venues and flagship buildings. It also depends on the smaller, less glamorous infrastructures that make participation possible in classrooms, church halls, youth clubs, festivals and community spaces every single week of the year.

Often, it's the things with the lowest profile that end up carrying the widest impact.

I understand fully that organisations like Bryson are operating under immense pressure. Everyone is. But before one of the very few dedicated creative reuse resources on these islands disappears entirely, surely there is value in pausing long enough to ask whether another way forward might still be possible.
Because resources like this do not merely save waste from landfill. They save the idea of sustainable creativity. 

A public petition supporting the Scrap Store is also currently circulating online at change.org
If you wish to express concern regarding the proposed closure of Bryson Arts & Play Scrap Store, you can contact Bryson Recycling

The Arts Matter. 

Fool me twice... expect the worse

“Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.”

Fool me a third time… just who exactly should feel ashamed now?

Last year I wrote here that in 2024, the funding situation was unprecedented. It was genuinely shocking. In twenty five years working in the arts sector here, I had never known anything like it. Organisations entered a new financial year without Letters of Offer from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. No confirmation of funding. No contracts. No clarity about whether they would even meet the threshold to continue operating.

For a sector that had spent decades professionalising governance, compliance and delivery, the situation was extraordinary.

Then 2025 arrived and it happened again.

By that stage the shock had begun to give way to something else. Concern, certainly. But also a dawning realisation that what had been presented as an anomaly might actually be becoming a pattern.

And now we find ourselves in 2026, speeding towards the end of another fiscal year with April on the horizon.

At this point, the debate about whether the situation is unprecedented, is academic. Once may be misfortune. Twice may be careless as Oscar might have said. But three years in, the real question becomes something else entirely. Expected?

Because in February 2025 the Minister issued a Letter of Expectations to the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. The implication seemed clear enough. New priorities were being signalled. A tighter, more concerned supervision of the sector would ensue. A revised policy direction for the arts would follow.

And we waited  - in expectation. Sector representatives were subsequently advised in October last year, by the most senior civil servants in charge, that consultation on that policy would begin early in 2026.

Yet here we are.

The Heritage, Culture and Creativity Framework (HCCF) has of course been published (last July in fact, almost a year to the day after we were told to anticipate its development). The indicative budget for DFC was also disclosed and many sent in their consultation documents last year too. The HCC Framework (HCCF) is expansive in tone and somewhat ambitious in its aspirations for the wider cultural landscape. But the specific policy governing the arts sector itself — the framework organisations are actually expected to operate within — remains conspicuously absent.

• There has been no draft policy.
• No consultation
• No timeline.

Which raises a fairly obvious question.

What exactly are we meant to expect now?

Expectations, after all, are not a one-way street. When government outlines expectations for a sector, that sector might reasonably expect something in return: clarity of direction, engagement in shaping policy, and the basic stability required to plan work responsibly.

Instead we have been cautioned not to expect too much from the forthcoming policy itself. It has been suggested that what will emerge will be a policy, rather than a strategy.

In other words, it may describe where government would like the sector to end up, but offer little indication of how that might actually be achieved.

That distinction matters.

A strategy identifies mechanisms, resources, responsibilities and timelines. A policy that simply articulates desirable outcomes without addressing the practicalities of delivery is something rather different. It describes a destination without offering a map. A first class ticket to nowhere if you will.

One might reasonably wonder whether that is what the sector is now expected to organise its future around. A policy that as yet, doesn't exist, despite a gestation of years.

Meanwhile the political calendar is quietly ticking away, becoming more and more audible with each party conference  - the manifestos are being thought about, the rhetoric honed anticipated a bitter campaign in the run up to elections next May.  Anyone familiar with the rhythms of government understands what that implies. Policy development takes time. Consultation takes time. Implementation certainly takes time.

So if consultation on an arts policy has not yet begun, how exactly will it translate into meaningful change before this mandate expires in less than a year? Or should we be relieved that that's the case?

As seems more likely now,  are we drifting toward yet another funding cycle without political direction for the arts?

Into this already uncertain picture comes another remarkable development.

The Arts Council of Northern Ireland itself has now published an assessment outlining what it believes is required simply to stabilise the sector after more than a decade of erosion. Its analysis suggests that restoring baseline sustainability would require an opening investment of £21.27 million for 2026–27, almost double the current baseline allocation.

This is not a casual observation.

Arm’s length bodies do not normally publish such stark assessments of their own funding position. Yet here the Arts Council is effectively acknowledging what organisations and artists have been saying for years: that the system has been operating under sustained pressure since at least 2010, and that without intervention the likely consequences are fewer jobs, reduced programming and diminished reach across communities.

In other words, the infrastructure of the sector is already under massive strain.

And yet the organisations expected to support cultural life across Northern Ireland continue to operate in a policy vacuum.

As I have said before as well, every publicly funded arts organisation here is governed by volunteer trustees carrying legal responsibilities for the charities they oversee. Those trustees are expected to ensure their organisations operate responsibly and manage risk appropriately. In return, they might expect some policy guidance as to how government intends to support them and their cherished creative missions on behalf of their participants, their audinces, their people. 

And while all this inertia and vacuum sucks the air from our lungs, another suggestion has begun circulating.

Some have argued that what artists here really need here is a Northern Ireland version of the Basic Income for Artists scheme currently operating in the Republic. It is an appealing idea. Who would object to giving artists greater financial security (apart from a long and continuing line of civil servants and ministers in NI of course)?

But the comparison is worth noting.

The Republic did not introduce that scheme in isolation. The pilot emerged after years of sustained public investment in the arts, with overall state funding to their Arts Council alone now reaching roughly €140 million annually. The basic income programme itself was introduced within that strengthened ecosystem and has since been made permanent following a really positive evaluation of how it has enabled artists to engage better with that infrastructure. 

In other words, the weekly payments to a couple of thousand artists are not the foundation of Irish arts policy. They are the result of it.

Here in Northern Ireland the situation is rather different. Our funding base has been eroded for more than a decade. Organisations operate with some of the lowest levels of public investment across these islands. The Arts Council itself is now warning that the existing system requires significant uplift simply to remain viable.

Against that backdrop, proposing a basic income scheme here begins to sound less like a policy intervention and more like a policy shortcut. You can't build a roof before laying the foundations. And how many could it actually help? If you developed a comparable scheme, based on a pro-rated per capita basis, you'd have to support about 700 artists, with about £15k a year. That alone would totally eclipse the Arts Council's annual budget here. So, I'm not sure that its even feasible to talk about because at present , with the very foundations of the arts here increasingly uncertain. 

Just to remind you:

• no settled government arts policy, 
• no political delivery strategy, 
• and a sector already operating under sustained financial pressure with another major conflict that threatens to deepen the cost of living crisis, that seems to herald austerity as an ever-present. 

And yet, despite everything, the great work continues.

Artists still create. Organisations still deliver programmes. Communities still participate.

The high-wire act continues, as the fortunes of all sway uneasily. 

But, if you value the arts at all, please recognise that this sector's resilience should not be mistaken for consent. And patience should not be mistaken for meek compliance. Our work is our livelihood. Our work matters to other lives too. 

And after all these years of uncertainty, the sector has just got used to being demoralised, threatened, undermined, ignored and left behind. As our MLAs enjoy a payrise of £14,000 per year, representing £2,000 more than the mean earnings of artists in the North only a few years ago, our political class sit on their hands when it comes to assisting the arts. And soon, as they ratchet up the hyperbole of electioneering, they will be telling us just how important we all are as artists. 

Sigh...

We don't expect much at this point however. 

Just the basics.

A policy that exists.     A strategy that explains how it works.

And a government that understands the difference.                     That would be a start. 

The Arts Matter. 

Creating a Change - Part One: Access - Finding a Way

Twenty-three years ago last month, I had the privilege of becoming the leader of a community arts organisation. I had been working in community contexts for years before, but this was different. This was an almost unique opportunity to help not just define where art and social purpose met — but to make something happen, where our creativity had to prove itself, in the lives and places of people too often left out of the cultural conversation. To make a New Belfast. 

The great, foundational platform of Community Arts Forum, established in 1995 by Martin Lynch and later guided by Heather Floyd, had arrived at a very unique, succinct and elegant way of describing everything that was community arts  - Access, Participation, Authorship and Ownership. I was enchanted not only at the simplicity, but the universality and profundity those 4 words allowed. Those 4 words became everything to me, professionally and artistically, over more than 25 years.  They still guide me today and test my work but they also offer a frame of reference as to how our world has caught up with that vision and perhaps ignored the valuable insights they offered. 

In the years since, Access has come to mean something far more complex than many may first have imagined, but others may have also tried to narrow the definition too. It’s not just about opening doors - it's not just accessibility (which is also central to its meaning) - it’s also about elbowing your way into a discourse and trying to change the structures that decide who gets a key to the door in the first place.

In these next months of blogs , I will try to reframe those four powerful and interconnecting words into a series, to re-examine a quarter of a century of creative determination  -  from above and below - and where we find ourselves today. It's a small reflection of policy and outcomes in my own corner of the sector. 

A New Chapter

As I write, CAP is in motion again — packing boxes, planning moves, negotiating terms and making space for what’s next. Moving premises always makes me think about purpose: what we’ve built, what still matters, and what needs re-imagined.

It always feels like a time of renewal. The CEMENT programme (community, engagement, mentoring, networking and training) is gathering pace, new partnerships are forming, and our move signals more than a change of address — it’s a chance to restate what community arts mean in a society that’s showing its age; fraying at the edges and increasingly fiscally fragile.

Over the months ahead, I’ll use this space to explore what I’ve now come to call the Four A’s: Access, Agency, Authorship and Active Ownership. They describe not just how participation happens, but how creativity becomes social action — how people move from being invited in, to leading, shaping and sustaining the work themselves.

These pieces aren’t manifestos so much as reflections from practice — part memory, part provocation — written as we seek to settle into a new home and a new phase. My hope is that they’ll help clarify where we stand, and how community arts can keep acting as a small but vital force for renewal. And to invite others to carry that momentum forward. 

I had been working in community and development contexts for years before — in neighbourhoods, even countries, where creativity was often the only bright light left on — but running an organisation was different.

I began to understand Access not as a gesture or an outcome to report, but as a lifelong act of translation: between policy and people, between those who hold resources and those who hold stories, between the rhetoric of inclusion and the lived reality of connection.

So Access is not just another noun, nor another verb — it's something you do, and keep doing. It’s what happens when you see an opportunity that doesn’t yet exist and set about creating it. In Northern Ireland and everywhere else, that act of creation has always been political (big or small 'p'), even when it doesn’t look like it. That was the powerful beauty and elegant ignition of Martin Lynch’s vision for community arts here. 

We live in a place where the divisions of history overlap with the inequalities of disadvantage; where the peace walls and the dole queues often trace the same terrain. To speak about Access in such a context is to confront the deep architecture of exclusion: not just who gets to participate, but whose imagination is resourced, whose future is planned for. And that ‘them and us’, is as vertical as it is horizontal. It isn’t about two traditions, but it isn’t not about them either, if that makes sense. It's about more and much less.

When I started at New Belfast Community Arts in 2000, access began as inclusion. But it soon translated as intervention. Today still, when government systems fail to provide even the basics — when NHS waiting lists stretch into years, when teachers are patching windows with cardboard to keep classrooms draught-free; then the idea of access to culture becomes a test of what we still believe a public life should really be.  Access becomes a mirror, reflecting who and what we are prepared to leave behind. It measures not only how many people attend a workshop or exhibition, but the moral reach of our institutions - our willingness to imagine rights as something that must be shared, not rationed.

When communities remain under-served decade after decade, this is not a bureaucratic oversight; it is a declaration of priorities. At a time when our Programme for Government is titled ‘Doing What Matters Most’, the implication is easy to read. The pattern of exclusion reveals our values far more truthfully than any governmental plan.

As the great Raymond Williams put it, “Culture is ordinary: that is where we must start.”

Access, in that spirit, asks whether our cultural systems have really started there — with the ordinary, the overlooked, the unheard, the marginal...the other.

Much of my working life therefore has been spent in translation: between the communities we serve, the artists we support and the policymakers who struggle to serve them all.

Every funding application, every consultation, every partnership is a small act of reinterpretation: taking the language of governance, the funder, the policy, and turning it toward human experience.

That’s what access work often looks like - unglamorous, iterative, sometimes exhausting. That there is the spirit of community arts.

It’s the art of converting intention into possibility, of finding the gaps in the system and quietly widening them until someone else can step through. There is a kind of grace in that persistence, but also a cost. I am lucky that I get to witness the graciousness of community artists’ generosity and impact all the time. Part of my role as an advocate is to sometimes live between two worlds: one that speaks in metrics, and one that voices need. The trick is not to let the first silence the second. And if one parrots the language of the neoliberal, one needs to be vigilant not to adopt their grammar. 

That’s why Williams still matters to me. In Resources of Hope, published after his death, he wrote that “to be truly radical is to make hope possible, rather than despair convincing.” Those words feel like a quiet manifesto for community arts - the work of making hope possible, not through slogans, but through the steady building of pathways into creativity.

Access can be imagined as a threshold - once taken, everything can change. For CAP, access has always meant shaping and supporting the pathway beyond: lobbying for changes in policy, reframing funding, and reinterpreting opportunities for “participation” so that it means genuine authorship can flourish. After that, some stakehold is established, the legacy of ownership. All of which I'll offer my take in future posts.

Access is not about bringing people into "our world of the arts", that's the grab-hold language of ‘outreach’. It’s about expanding that world until it already includes them all. That’s why this work can’t be detached from questions of social justice, economy, or belonging.

When we talk about access, we are talking about redistribution; of resources, of visibility, of equity. We are talking about cultural democracy not as an aspiration, but as infrastructure: the connective tissue of a society that still believes in itself. 

Another great foundational quote from Williams is that “the test of a true democracy is not how it speaks to the powerful, but how it listens to the ordinary.”

I think about that often. The “ordinary” here have endured extraordinary things; from the grinding marginalisation of socio-economic disadvantage, to the inheritance of trauma from previous generations, to the hateful ‘othering’ of communities struggling for an equitable foothold in this place.

Yet in every community we work with, I see imagination at work: stubborn, generous, resourceful, talented - surviving against the odds. That is where access resides too... not with policy documents but with the quiet courage of people still willing to make and share meaning together. That is culture.

In a time when so much feels broken - when public life itself seems to be unravelling with every stark warning of loss, cuts and closure - with every bewidering technological broadens a digital divide - Access also becomes an act of faith. Faith in the idea that creativity is not what we reach for when life improves, but part of how we actually improve life. Faith in the idea that democracy is not only a vote, but a voice - and that every act of making, however small, is a rehearsal for that voice being heard.

So, when we speak about Access now, we should mean possibility. We should mean the stubborn refusal to accept that austerity should extend to the imagination. Access is not just the beginning of the process; it’s the measure of our cultural democracy and the test of our civic hope.

PS We had a great initial session of ReImagining Arts Advoacy on the 10th October at QUB Centre for Ethnography, with my comrades Sara Walmsley and Mairead Duffy and host of others. More to come on that...

April Fools, 2025

April 1st. The day of fools. But for Northern Ireland’s arts sector, April Fools’ Day has lost all novelty—it’s just another date on the calendar when absurdity takes centre stage.

Today marks the beginning of the new financial year. Not a single annually funded arts organisation has received a Letter of Offer from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. No one even knows if they met the threshold to receive funding. We are now officially into a new working year with not a penny of funding in place, no contracts signed, no safety net, no core support from our principal funder - just a hope that something might land in the inbox before insolvency kicks in, or the protective redundancy notices get sent.

Last year, this situation was unprecedented. It was truly shocking. In 25 years, I’d never known such an instance.  Bear in mind that in that quarter of a century, the arts have professionalised massively here. And the whole area of applied creativity is so embedded in every facet of publicly funded arts services right across the country.  But for this to happen again - this year, with all we know, with all we have said, with all the evidence that we continue to lay out? That’s not just alarming any more ; it’s absurd. Who was it that said: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” That’s right, apparently the same fellow who said “Not everything that counts can be counted.” Go figure Einstein!

Given the year we’ve just had, what’s the strategy to take things forward? The Arts Council of Northern Ireland’s 10-Year Strategic Plan, 2024–34 - which had only recently been developed through extensive consultation and which has guided every funding application over the past year, seems to have been effectively pushed aside. Now, whatever you may feel about such strategies , we all need parameters to work within, especially when we anticipate gaining investment from the hard-pressed public purse. And we know that despite that corporate language and the objectives, this is intended to support the creative sector here and all that flows from that. But that sectoral engagement and those ambitions have seemingly been overwritten by just a few lines in a ministerial statement and a Letter of Expectations. And when you compare the broad, ambitious aims of the ACNI strategy - supporting artistic excellence, inclusion, sustainability, and access across all communities - with the minister’s rather minimalist declaration and somewhat vague expectations, whilst the contrast in presentation could not be starker, there seems to be so much alignment in the substantive priorities and direction: wellbeing, inclusion, community engagement, creative participation, and collaboration. So why, then, the realignment? Why the implication that what we have all been doing over the years has somehow failed, when the strategic direction of travel already broadly matches? Priorities such as widening participation, enhancing inclusion, fostering innovation, and contributing to wellbeing are present in both. Given this alignment, it is reasonable to ask: why introduce ambiguity, risk, and delay when the means to deliver those objectives are in place? 

And, if that isn’t the case, what is? Where is the ministerial strategy for the arts… what's the timeline?

Meanwhile, our Programme for Government, for what it's worth, talks of wellbeing. Of tackling inequality. Of cross-departmental collaboration. Of investing in people, place, and opportunity. But how does it square with the fact that not one arts organisation knows if it can keep its staff, deliver its projects, or even pay the electricity bill?

What’s more, every publicly funded arts organisation in this country is governed by unpaid trustees, (directors and board members), whose own personal liability is the guarantee that underpins all these charities. And all publicly-funded arts organisations are charities, with objectives approved by the government, to carry out fundamentally beneficial support to our society. Each and every one of them. Its volunteers who offer oversight to them, who are charged with the responsibility to ensure that their charities are run safely and compliantly. What do these people do today, as a whole sector holds its breath…again? Do they have reserves? Is it too risky to operate a charity in this situation, with no surety about anything? Should their risk registers light up red across the board? At what point do these organisations fall foul of charitable legislation around illegal trading? Is this the way good governance works or do those politically charged with supporting the arts bear some responsibility too?

The PfG talks more about enabling sectors to flourish. It talks about innovation, creative industries, skills development, cultural inclusion, and mental health. It gestures toward a vision of a joined-up, vibrant society. But on the ground? The people delivering all that vision: the organisations, volunteers, artists, facilitators, and communities, what do they get?

Yes, this April Fools day, just who are the fools? It's us isn’t it?

Because we are asked to believe. To trust that funding will come, with no guarantee it will. That a strategy is coming. That investment is on its way. Are we deluded? 

Despite it all, the sector endures. It adapts. Perhaps foolishly, it still shows up. But let’s not mistake that faltering resilience for consent. Let's not pretend that the sector's determination is a vote of confidence in all this. People have mortgages, dependents and families, responsibilities… and loads of skill and ambition.

Elsewhere in the UK, investment in culture is being ramped up. Grand announcements. Real money. Concrete commitments. Here? We’re still waiting …

So again: are we the fools?

The ones who still perform on the high wire—with no safety net in place, only protective redundancy notices waiting in the wings? The ones who must keep their balance while the ground beneath them shifts unpredictably? 

The minister first announced “new priorities” back in July 2024. It’s now April 2025. So:

Where is the strategy?

When will we see a draft?

Who has been consulted in its development?

When will the statutory consultation begin?

And what will the timeline be for implementation?

Because if this drags on, we may well find ourselves at the end of 2025, once again facing a December deadline for annual funding applications without a coherent strategy to apply to… And what then? Will it be the same next year? Will this whole sector be asked to suspend disbelief again and accept this narrative, this continuing drama?

And why, having refined so many multiple cultural strategies, reports, and consultative frameworks (culminating in the ground-breaking cross-departmental co-designed Investing in Creative Delivery 2023, which took two years and involved expert input from all corners of culture arts and heritage sectors), does government continue to rewrite the script? Why, when representatives and leaders responded to the challenge and have co-designed and collaboratively developed expressing articulately, objectively, just where culture, arts and heritage are and how they can be better supported, why is all that being sidelined, as we wait for piecemeal strategies, one for the arts, one for culture… all apparently coming soon? 

I recall being at a meeting, way back in 2003, where representatives from across those self-same sectors bemoaned the fact that we continued to have work in silos instead of recognising how interconnected our processes could become and how much more effective our collective creative and community facing support could be. That was 22 years ago. As glaciers recede at a frightening pace across the globe, we can no longer point to their incremental pace…Culture and arts and heritage don't live in isolation  - they live in schools, in hospitals, in youth centres, businesses, in streets and city halls, old people's residential care, as well as theatres, pubs, institutions, museums, libraries, tourist attractions…They underpin who we are and what we do. They are interconnected. They are the very basis of how we see ourselves and how we let others see us. 

And the ministerial Letter of Expectations of February this year, talks about respect, pointedly saying that funding must not support anything “disrespectful of any tradition.” What does that mean? Is it disrespectful to our tradition of making art in our community, our long established customs of supporting truly ground-breaking arts organisations and artists, to now further destabilise the work we do, the work we have shown to be exemplary, compliant with all existing ambitions and objectives; produced year on year despite the worst levels of under-investment in these islands for decades? Does that constitute respect? Is it respectful to the communities of interest, practice or place, communities on the very margins of society, and our artists and artisans, musicians and facilitators, or those whose ethnicity or perhaps disability creates even more obstacles to participate in the cultural life of this place… does it show respect for all our collective traditions and ambitions to have everyone hold their breath, performing a high wire act without a safety net?

Are artists meant to tiptoe quietly around everyone and everything; every interpretation of identity, history, or society? Has the traditional role of art making changed? And if we are to be told that it has, how do we respond? Will we be informed just how in the new strategy? 

And yet, across the water, in Westminster, Jennie Lee’s legacy from 1948 is being invoked again. Lisa Nandy, Secretary of State for DCMS, speaks of arts everywhere, of £270 million in new funding, of a renewed cultural compact with communities. Fit-for-purpose infrastructure. A vision of culture embedded in everyday life. A moment of renewal for citizens of …well not here. Because let’s be absolutely clear - UK arts policy has no impact in Northern Ireland. These announcements don’t trickle down or across. Even when there is a Barnett consequential, would we see any of that additional money that represents that hope of renewal? No,  the funding gets swallowed up in the Northern Ireland block grant, never to be ring-fenced or invested in our local cultural infrastructure. Not a penny of that cultural succour is guaranteed for any artist or organisation, or venue here. Or has there been a statement in that regard that I foolishly missed? Unfortunately, no, there hasn’t. 

So whilst we might applaud the creative ambition of “across the water”, we are not even an audience…just bystanders. 

So maybe that’s the ultimate April Fool’s, beyond the joke. That we keep going. That we do it for love, for community, for passionate belief. That we somehow convince ourselves that holding it all together is enough, is a necessity turned virtue. But is it? The definition of resilience is not being overwhelmed. 

So no, perhaps we shouldn’t smile politely through this one, on this April Fool’s Day…