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.