Ireland and the basic income for art

Source: Irland und das Grundeinkommen für Kunst | ARTE Tracks, Arte TRACKS, 17:49, uploaded 2026-01-12, playlist index 113.

Ireland’s Basic Income for Artists programme gives 2,000 creative workers €325 a week for three years. The payment comes without a performance report or a requirement to produce a particular kind of work. ARTE Tracks follows artists in Dublin and London, then asks what happens when a state treats artistic work as work that deserves time and a stable floor beneath it.

Precarity as a reason to leave

The report begins with the ordinary condition the programme tries to interrupt. Creative workers live with unstable income, uncertain contracts and the expectation that they should accept this as part of the job. The people interviewed connect that insecurity to anxiety, poor mental health and the difficulty of making anything whilst worrying about food, rent and bills.

Frankie McNamara describes Ireland as a country with a large amount of cultural talent and too few opportunities to support it. He makes social-media work through Meditations for the Anxious Mind and a series called Cultural Observations. He moved to London because the city offers more funding, a larger entertainment industry and more infrastructure. For people working in the Irish arts, he says, the question often becomes when they will move to London rather than whether they will move at all.

The band Sprints supplies a different version of the same pressure. Its members began by making music after work, then found enough interest to tour internationally. The band had to fit full-time jobs, touring, studio recording, unpaid work and unemployment into the same years. One member describes playing New York as an extraordinary experience, whilst the money took years to become reliable. The band now works in music full time, although two members live in London and two remain in Dublin.

A Dublin cartoonist gives the most direct account of what the payment changes. Before receiving the basic income, he had €30 to live on for two weeks. He had drawn comics since 2007 and had several long-running projects, yet financial pressure kept the work from reaching readers. During the three years of the programme, he publishes a large collection of diary comics and uses Kickstarter to make a 200-page book. That book earns enough to fund a second 200-page book. The payment does not turn the work into a success by itself. It gives him enough room to finish work that had already existed as an intention for years.

A pilot designed as a comparison

The Basic Income for Artists programme grows out of the COVID-19 pandemic. Ireland’s previous culture minister created a task force to revive the cultural sector, and its main recommendation was a basic-income pilot for artists. Jenny Walton, the programme’s operational lead, describes it as a research pilot designed as a randomised controlled study.

The structure is precise. Two thousand artists receive €325 each week. A control group of 1,000 creative workers receives no payment. Both groups complete a detailed questionnaire of more than 80 questions every six months. The researchers then compare changes between the groups over time.

Applicants had to live in Ireland when they applied and throughout the programme. Retaining creative workers in the country is one of the stated goals because artists leave Ireland or leave the sector when the economics become impossible. The scheme therefore treats emigration and attrition as cultural-policy problems, rather than as private career choices that government can ignore.

The lottery drew from around 8,000 eligible applicants, according to one participant. The selection process appears unusually plain by arts-funding standards. One artist says that he only had to show that his work had already earned money. Once selected, he bought better equipment and began preparing for the next year. The point of the payment is therefore less about rewarding an established masterpiece than about removing the financial interruption that keeps a working artist from completing the next piece of work.

Time returns to the work

The people interviewed describe the benefit in practical terms. The cartoonist can publish projects that had stayed unfinished. Another participant starts writing children’s books. Members of Sprints can work with a degree of continuity that was previously hard to sustain. The report presents these cases as evidence that the payment changes the amount of time artists can give to their work, the amount they invest in it and the possibility of remaining in Ireland.

The report also links the payment to physical and mental well-being. Its broader claim comes from an independent cost-benefit analysis commissioned around the programme. ARTE Tracks reports that every euro spent on the basic income produces €1.39 in social value when the analysis counts improved mental well-being, lower social costs, higher productivity and effects in local economies.

That figure belongs to the report’s account of the analysis. The programme’s own research findings are presented in summary form, without the underlying questionnaire, results tables or named publication. The €1.39 figure therefore describes a reported policy evaluation rather than a result that this note can independently test. The mechanism remains plausible within the examples: a person with enough money to work may spend more time working, need less emergency support and put money back into nearby businesses. The size of the return requires the missing study details.

The report treats the familiar image of the starving artist as a damaging social habit. Hunger does not make the work more authentic. It consumes the attention that the work needs and normalises the idea that cultural labour can remain unpaid. One artist says that he is most creative when he has a safety net. The payment turns that private observation into a policy claim: creative work can produce public value when the people making it have enough stability to continue.

A small scheme inside an expensive country

Ireland approves a follow-up programme for 2026 with a budget of a little over €18 million. It will remain close to the pilot’s scale, with 2,000 or perhaps 2,200 recipients. The artists interviewed had hoped it would grow. They estimate that a larger programme would cost around €35 million a year and compare that figure with the €100 million the government spends each year on horse and greyhound racing.

The comparison is political rather than a full public-finance analysis. It asks what the state chooses to fund when culture remains one of Ireland’s strongest ways of presenting itself to the world. It also exposes the limit of the payment. One artist says that €325 a week sounds generous when viewed from France or Germany, yet Dublin has become the most expensive place in the European Union to rent a home. As a single person, he lives with his parents. Renting would still require a full-time job alongside the art.

The basic income creates time inside an existing housing crisis. It can pay for equipment, food and continuity. It cannot by itself make a Dublin flat affordable or reverse the shortage of cultural infrastructure that sends artists to London. The report’s strongest cases show what a floor permits. They do not show that the floor is high enough for independence.

Payment without artistic permission

The programme also raises the familiar fear that public money will bring public control. The cartoonist has criticised the Irish government in his comics. He says the programme team does not inspect his work and cannot withdraw the payment because they dislike what he makes. Some artists initially worried that recipients would become government-sanctioned creatives producing propaganda. He answers that Irish artists are so sarcastic that state support would probably make the work more subversive.

Sprints has applied for and received other public funding whilst taking positions critical of government and society. The band says that those views have not affected its eligibility. The basic income sits inside a wider Irish support structure that includes the Arts Council, local authorities and local arts officers. The pilot adds a payment without replacing those institutions or turning one state programme into the sole route through which artists can work.

That separation matters. A grant tied to a project can ask what will be made and whether the result satisfies a panel. A basic income can recognise the worker before a finished object exists. The programme still selects its recipients, limits eligibility to people living in Ireland and relies on a public budget. It removes one form of artistic supervision whilst leaving the political question of who belongs inside the category of creative worker.

Culture as a reason to stay

The final interviews move from the payment to Ireland’s idea of itself. Irish culture has long been treated as something people do in their spare time, often without pay. The artists in the report describe culture as a source of identity shaped by colonial history, the loss of the Irish language and the need to tell stories about where the country came from.

They also describe a current cultural renewal that carries explicit political positions. Irish artists speak about the people who are left out and about opposition to genocide. The report presents this as a change in Ireland’s image abroad, away from the safe export of leprechauns, Guinness and a country imagined as harmless. Its interviewees want the state to take the work seriously because culture gives people ways to describe their country and to speak against power.

The report ends with a simple claim from the people it follows. Ireland has a strong music scene and a large store of artistic ability. Paying artists gives some of that ability the time to continue. The pilot cannot solve rent, emigration or the size of the cultural sector, and the reported evidence remains partial. It does show what changes when a creative worker receives money without having to first prove that the next work will succeed.

Evidence limits

The report is a short television feature built from participant interviews and statements from the programme’s operational lead. It presents the randomised design, the reported well-being effects and the €1.39 social return without publishing the study instruments, full results or cost-benefit report. The claims about a cultural renaissance, Ireland’s changing image and the value of particular public spending choices come from the people interviewed. They are part of the source’s argument and should remain attributed to them.

The programme amount is €325 per week in the video description and in the programme lead’s explanation. The automatic German captions render some participant references as €350. I treat €325 as the source’s reliable figure and preserve the discrepancy as a caption error rather than presenting both amounts as separate policy facts.