It was 2019, Angela Dorgan has just stepped into the role of Chair of the National Campaign for the Arts (NCFA) in Ireland when it became immediately clear that a sector-wide survey was needed. When COVID-19 hit the following year, Dorgan went to the sector to find out what sort of support arts workers and organisations required, from their perspective. The NCFA then set out to make an argument to government to increase funding in the sector – seeking something radical that could fundamentally change how artists earn their living. And it succeeded.
Ireland’s new Basic Income for the Arts (BIA) is a pilot scheme running over three years from 2022-2025 and offering a payment of EUR325 (283.94 pounds sterling) a week to artists and creative workers. Around 2000 eligible applicants were randomly selected to take part in the scheme.
Dorgan was recently in Australia, speaking at Bodies of Work – A Symposium hosted by Vitalstatistix and Reset Arts and Culture, alongside Director of Culture Ireland, Sharon Barry. Dorgan and Barry are integral members of the team driving and analysing the outcomes of Ireland’s BIA.
A similar call for a basic income for artists has been floating around in Australia for many years, with key sector leaders such as Dr Jo Caust a staunch advocate, as well as the Greens party pushing the agenda in its campaigns. Campaigners in the UK have also followed suit. A survey released in March this year, claims that many artists in the UK are being forced to work for an hourly rate of £2.60 per hour – way below the country’s legal minimum wage of £9.50 per hour.
Since Ireland’s BIA launch, some participants have been able to quit their day jobs to focus on their creative practice full-time while, for others, it is offering the financial security needed to advance their careers.
Speaking with ArtsHub, Dorgan calls COVID-19 the ‘perfect storm’ that tied the public together with the arts – enabling the former to understand the necessity of the latter, but also the dire situation artists were in. With a new government, it was prime time for change. ‘When COVID happened [in Ireland] from March 2020, it sent us off in several directions. One, we knew we had to do our “Hearts and Minds” campaign where we were speaking authentically from what the artists were telling us.
‘COVID really drove home the message that no literature, no music, no theatre, no arts – no point. It was that “aha!” moment that made the public go to the politicians to advocate for us,’ she continues.
In a way, BIA became a testing ground for a universal basic income, which some of the political parties in Ireland were seriously considering, and still are.
But now that most have returned to business as usual, could the success of NCFA’s call for artists’ basic income still be replicated in other countries?
Backed by the public: why a universal understanding of the value of the arts matters
Dorgan was particularly gratified to hear what other speakers at the symposium had to say. ‘What was interesting to me was there are more people working in the arts and cultural industries in Ireland than there are in Australia, and you are three times our population size,’ she says.
‘I do think there’s a certain maturity in Ireland about how we feel about the arts and artists, and a lot of that takes its cue from the French as well… Since we’ve been travelling to different countries, it has made me realise that it’s not the pandemic [that made us successful]. The first question you have to ask yourselves [as a sector] is: “How does the population in your country value the arts?”’
Barry tells ArtsHub the value associated with the arts can also be determined by the language used around them. ‘I think the way the sector itself communicates with people can sometimes be problematic.’
She explains: ‘By being elitist, or setting the arts out as something is elitist, is problematic. I think the arts is highly democratic, but the structures around the arts can become exclusionary.’ The precarity created by competitive funding structures adds to this issue of defining the value of art, in a way that can become reductive.
Barry continues: ‘Art for art’s sake should be enough, and the value that adds to the individuals making the art and the people engaging with it, should be enough. We don’t ask a doctor at the end of the year to prove how many patients were cured or killed, so why are we using those measures for artists and cultural workers?’
Dorgan adds in a similar vein, ‘If the arts is a round hole, avoid spending time, money and energy to make yourself into a square peg. I think the reason the “Hearts and Minds” campaign worked was because it was simple. We asked the public to convince their political representatives that [the arts] were important because they themselves believed they were.
‘Listen to the artists and arts workers, and empower them. Acknowledge that artists are also everyday citizens and taxpayers themselves. They are not just out there, being different people; they have mortgages, kids, responsibilities, disabilities, and health and housing challenges like all of us.’
A lobbyist approach was a strategy the NCFA consciously chose to avoid.
Criteria for eligibility
Regarding the criteria for artists to apply for BIA, Dargon tells ArtsHub the process was quite democratic. ‘We have three pillars of evidence and as long as you could prove you met two of them [you would satisfy the criteria].
‘One was professional membership of a relevant representative organisation, two that you prove you earned income from the arts and the third was evidence of creative practice.’
As long as applicants could provide evidence from the past five years (taking into account a possible period of dormancy during COVID), they could be eligible for BIA.
A first, but hopefully not last
Despite how many people may have considered Ireland’s BIA a significant and successful case study of championing for financial security in the arts, Barry says, ‘Sometimes we didn’t realise what we were doing was quite so [impactful internationally].’
Dorgan adds: ‘We didn’t think it was going to be important outside of Ireland, but we should have [known] because, when we went looking for examples, there weren’t any other basic income trials that had gone to completion. It was important from where Ireland stands culturally in the world that it was us to do it, that’s where our Minister [for Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media of Ireland] Catherine Martin needs to be applauded. She was our magic dose, who spent all her political capital [supporting BIA].’
For a long time now, the idea of a basic income for the arts has been a bit like a unicorn – often mentioned, but never seen in action. And perhaps, for many of us, there’s always been a little voice in our heads saying that a basic income would be “too good to be true”.
Dorgan says similar sentiments definitely existed in Ireland as well, and the launch of the BIA pilot ‘silenced those voices who said, “Well, that would never happen”,’ she says.
‘It wasn’t a unicorn, it was a leprechaun all along!’
