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.
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. (Equity)
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 is 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. (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.
So this is not, strictly speaking, a Basic Income for Artists. It is a basic income for a randomly selected proportion of those considered eligible — rather like winning the lottery for artists.
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 reconsidering those awards upwards requires still more 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 in the provenance of the 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 first to press rather harder on the underinvestment we already know exists.
And closer to home, there is another problem.
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 new recurring expenditure for artists while hard-pressed arts organisations in your own city face the prospect of substantial reductions in support from the Council on which you sit.
That is not to suggest that Councillor Doherty personally devised those 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.
Which leaves us 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.
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 beging to approach levels of funding enjoyed elsewhere in these islands.
And I would very much welcome that discussion. ArtsMatterNI would too.
Indeed, judging by the artists walking up the hill at Stormont today, quite a lot of us would.
But 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 wish to emulate one, we cannot reasonably continue to ignore the other.
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