So it’s budget day today in the Republic of Ireland and of course, the gulf between them’ns and us’ns , for the arts at the very least, widens ever more.
A few back-of-the-envelope calculations are enough to make the eyes well up. The Republic’s Arts Council allocation for 2026 is €140 million, approximately £119 million. Up here, ACNI’s normal level of annual government allocation is around £13 million. I say is around because we are 7 months into the financial year and still operating from interim budgets that offer the unedifying prospect of a further 5% cut. But I digress … the Southern budget is therefore nine times the investment, for fewer than three times the population.
And alongside that southern Arts Council funding, we have heard further announcements today of €34.4 million for the basic artists’ income support scheme. That income scheme alone is worth roughly £29 million—more than twice the normal government allocation to our Arts Council.
Here, ACNI has asked government for £20 million-odd. Asked!! Seven months into the financial year, it still has no confirmed budget.
We have been making the case through Arts Matter NI for years. We have explained the disparity, demonstrated the reach of the work locally and argued for the appropriate levels of investment required to sustain it. Yet we find ourselves having to establish, repeatedly, that a functioning arts sector requires functioning public investment.
In some quarters of the northern arts scene, earnest folk are even returning to first principles and thinking about party manifestos in the run-up to next year’s elections. Fair enough. But with politicians at complete loggerheads over just about every facet of life at the minute, with no budget agreed and the unhappy prospect of £1.5 billion additional funding over three years actually being rejected, do we have enough functioning governance to justify calling this “a government” at all?
What confidence should we place in another round of promises when the present administration cannot provide certainty about the year we are already delivering?
Sure, we could spend our time making earnest pleas and contributions to the manifestos of local parties. We could explain our circumstances again and again, as we have done for years and years. But I’m afraid the evidence is already there, and the responsibility for acting on it rests with those in office.
The latest ACNI Annual Investment Survey may make uncomfortable reading for some, but it bears out the reality for many. Across some 97 regularly funded organisations, whilst income rose by 10.9% over three years, expenditure rose by more… 14.9%. A collective surplus of c. £1.9 million from previous years has now become a deficit of £213,000. And the core costs of running organisations have increased by 18%.
For those of us running arts organisations, these figures give statistical expression to our familiar daily experience. The cost of keeping the organisation capable of supporting artists and the wider arts community of audiences and participants is ever rising. And the funding fails to keep pace, year after year, widening the gulf between sustainability and crisis, us’ns up here and them’ns down south - or those ones in England, Scotland and Wales for that matter. And, the AIS report suggests, each year we continue to do more with less. For me, that is the very definition of unsustainability.
Earned income has increased by 17% over those three years. Meanwhile, public-sector income fell by 4.1% in the latest year, and trust and foundation income declined by almost 20% across the three-year period.
So, the sector is generating more of its own income. But its financial position is still deteriorating. You don't need a crystal ball do you.
Do we really need to be reminded of the reasons we need public resources to support the arts? I'll offer a few anyway... They might begin with a governmental responsibility to ensure that people can participate in cultural life regardless of their income, circumstances or postcode. It's an inalienable human right. And we have heard much about the wheretofores and obligations of maintaining cultural rights very recently haven’t we? But public funding also is there to protect livelihoods, enable creativity and support work whose impact cannot be measured through ticket sales or social media likes.
And of course, while some may argue that the market can sustain some cultural activity very successfully, it cannot ensure that a child in a rural school encounters a poet, or that a disabled person has the support to participate, or indeed that a community with little disposable income can develop and share its own work and say it has a stakehold in this place too.
Those opportunities require deliberate public investment in artists, organisations and relationships.
And if the arts become available principally to those who can pay, what becomes of our collective vision of a creative economy in the North or even more pointedly at present, a culturally democratic society here?
When opportunity depends on household income, unpaid time and personal connections, we narrow the pool from which our artists and creative workers emerge. We lose abilities, ideas and perspectives before they have a chance to develop. The creative economy itself is immediately diminished.
And the democratic consequences reach further. Who gets to make culture? Whose experiences become visible, whose stories circulate and who has the resources to influence how we understand ourselves? When money increasingly determines the answers, people already underrepresented face further barriers to becoming authors of their own cultural destinies. Too lofty? Well, at this moment of cultural impasse, I would say different.
Public investment should widen our communities opportunities to participate. It should give people the chance to develop their abilities, make meaningful choices and have a stake in the cultural life they help create. At CAP, we know that this requires skilled practitioners, trusted relationships and supported continuity.
And of course, we have all demonstrated time and again that there are substantial benefits for education, health and wellbeing, social cohesion and employment etc etc. But we should also be able to make and enjoy art for entertainment, and not necessarily always for the challenge and the rarified meaning. Every poem need not prove a health outcome; every performance need not justify itself through visitor spend. Imagination and expression are part of a worthwhile life and a public good.
And any credible creative economy needs opportunities through which talent can emerge from across society. Cultural democracy requires people to have the means to contribute and shape what happens. Both depend on public investment that reaches beyond those already able to pay.
Government cannot claim those ambitions while steadily making the conditions of participation more and more elusive and indeed exclusive.
Looking south today, we can see a government making substantial provision for artists and cultural life, even while our southern colleagues continue to argue and advocate that it falls short of what is needed down there. Up here, we are still waiting to learn what resources we have just to get through the year. The disparity is financial, certainly, but it also tells us something about the place the arts occupy in government’s priorities.
And the ACNI’s survey makes the consequences plain. Organisations are generating more income and absorbing greater costs, yet their financial position is worsening. Expecting them to charge their way out of that predicament risks making participation less accessible and our creative ambitions less real.
Through Arts Matter NI, we have spent years bringing these connected concerns to government. The organisations, artists and communities who have sustained that case have fresh evidence before them once again. We should use it together to demand answers about present investment as well as future promises. We should. But , at this moment, when even the offer of additional funding from the UK government might be rejected in the absolutism of our political masters, what should we really do?
Because whether we look south, across the water or into our own communities, the question remains: what cultural life do we want people here to be able to enjoy, create and share—and will those governing us provide the resources to make it possible? And if they do not, what should we do about it. Supporting long standing advocacy campaigns is one way at least.
Having a Programme for Government that actually keeps its promises would be something as well. But as we all know, the terms arts and culture didn’t appear in our last PfG commitments, so the government actually promised us nothing at all. For once, they have excelled themselves.
So...
All things are very far from equal … and the distance for this arts generation in Northern Ireland is now a world away.
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