“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. Expectated?
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.
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.
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