The government’s Basic Income for the Arts (BIA) pilot scheme reaches three years in operation this month. The scheme was originally set to finish after this period, however an extension until February 2026 was recently granted by government.
The stated aim of the scheme is to address financial instability of artists through a weekly payment. In 2022, out of a total of 8,206 eligible applicants, 2,000 artists were chosen—by lottery—to participate. Selected artists receive a guaranteed €325 per week income for the duration, and are required to take part in the scheme’s research programme, providing data on the impact of grant payments. A further 1,000 artists are part of a ‘control’ group, engaging in the research programme, but not receiving the weekly grant.
The BIA scheme represents an historic commitment to art and artists by the State, and has greatly impacted, mostly positively, the lives and work of participating artists.
Although generally considered a success by artists and government, the scheme is not without controversy. The BIA has received criticism for its approach to artists in receipt of disability and carers’ allowances, the selection of participating artists by lottery (and not artistic merit), and the delay in implementing a new scheme.
In June 2025, Minister for Culture, Communications and Sport Patrick O’Donovan TD announced the pilot scheme’s extension by six months. This would, he said, allow for a review of research in preparation for proposals for a new scheme. Significantly, the government committed to a ‘future iteration of the scheme’ and acknowledged ‘broad-based support’ for its extension–although fell short of announcing concrete plans.
We asked three writers (a poet, a novelist, and a non-fiction writer), and a visual artist, about their experiences as participants on the BIA pilot scheme.
Declan Toohey is from County Kildare. His first novel, Perpetual Comedown, was published by New Island in 2023.
Caelainn Hogan is a writer and journalist from Dublin. Her first book Republic of Shame investigates the ongoing legacy of Ireland’s religious-run, state-funded institutions and the shame-industrial complex that incarcerated ‘fallen’ women and their children. She has written for The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, National Geographic, The Guardian, VICE, Harper’s, The Washington Post, The Dublin Review and more.
Clíodhna Bhreatnach is a poet from Waterford who lives in Dublin. Her poetry has appeared in Poetry Ireland Review, The Stinging Fly, Propel and others. She was highly commended for the Forward Prize in 2022 and the Patrick Kavanagh Award in 2024. She was awarded a Dublin City Council Arts Bursary in 2025. Her debut pamphlet Pink roses, green was published by Green Bottle Press in 2025. Though speaking in her own capacity here, she is Secretary of Praxis: The Artists’ Union of Ireland.
Day Magee is a visual artist, performer, and writer based in Dublin. Exploring the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, and the intersections of queerness, illness, and religiosity, their work engages phenomenology as an enactive creative material via performance-centred multimedia and workshops. Their work has been commissioned by and appeared in TULCA Festival (2019); Arts & Disability Ireland (2021); Pallas Projects/Studios (2022); Limerick City Gallery of Art (2022); 126 Gallery (2023); Rua Red (2023); the Hugh Lane Gallery (2023) and Mirror Lamp Press (2024). Their practice is supported by the Arts Council of Ireland.
How did being selected for the Basic Income for the Arts pilot scheme impact your life and your work?
Declan Toohey: Practically, it has allowed me to both live and write in Dublin for an extended period of time, which is something I don’t take for granted given how expensive this city has become. From a more professional standpoint, the scheme has facilitated a rake of writing: I finished a novel, and several stories, and have started work on another novel, and I can’t imagine having done so if it wasn’t for the BIA. Most importantly it’s given me time—that lovely euphemism for money—in which to write whatever I want. Of course, there’s no guarantee that something you write will ever be published, and no guarantee still that what you publish will actually sell, but one antidote to such anxiety is to throw yourself fully at your artistic obsessions for a time, which is something I couldn’t have done without the stability of the monthly grant.
Caelainn Hogan: It is hard to talk about the benefits of this scheme when other artists are still being excluded. While those in power lack the political will to make everyday needs affordable, the impact is basic but life-changing. Everyone deserves to be free from precarity. When I started on the BIA, I was burned out after my first book and nearly a decade of writing about trauma, from conflict to systemic abuse. As a freelance writer, I suddenly had the peace of mind knowing I could afford rent and there was less pressure to take on work outside of writing. Over the years I have worked in bars, hotels, shops and markets to afford to write. With less financial insecurity, I was able to more easily afford and access support for my mental health. I got pregnant unexpectedly about half a year in and the Basic Income meant I could choose to have a child without the same financial insecurity and without the fear that I would have to give up creative work. I was also able to keep the small desk space in the artist’s studio where I work. So the Basic Income is keeping me writing.
Clíodhna Bhreatnach: It’s given dignity to my life. To give an example: in autumn 2023, a few months after the scheme’s introduction, I was depressed. For eight years, I had had my anxieties but not this terrible, draining low. I cried on the DART looking out at the sea; I sat on my bed and felt those black waves repeat within my brain. A friend encouraged me to go to therapy, but I was reluctant. I hadn’t gone since 2015, when after two sessions of long-repressed realisations, I was unable to afford a third. Rents and debts then consumed more than half my wages. However, thanks to the BIA, this time I had savings in my bank account. I found a therapist online, a woman with a kind face and auburn hair, named Gen. I paid 65 euro for an hour-long session each Monday for two months or so. I talked and talked. I realised I could not tell the story of my life, or the world of my life, in just one hour. So surely, I could certainly not make every poem carry my burden of expressive truth. My writing suddenly felt released from its lifelong cathartic responsibility. Those two months of me talking, Gen listening, made more difference to my life than I can say. But, the Basic Income being a lotto and receiving this state benevolence from sheer luck, made me feel painfully sad for my past self who had been mired in student debt and could not afford therapy, whose daily panic attacks took years to subside. Now I could pay to recover in two months. It felt like I was able to buy back my own life.
Day Magee: For the past three years, I have been able to support myself solely as an artist. Just before I received the news that I had been selected for the scheme, I was seriously considering changing my career path. Since then, I have been able to continue and further my professional creative practice, as well as move to Dublin city centre, which by itself allowed me to flourish in ways I had not before. I have since been awarded Arts Council funding and numerous mentorships and residencies. I have also been able to stage my work internationally for the first time. My professional network surged across the multiple creative circles that reflected my own cross-disciplinary practice, including being a part of Frustrated Writers’ Group, which beyond the professional sphere yielded lasting friendships. I do a bit of everything, and I was able to maximise my experimentation across mediums not only in isolation but in professional practice. I also took pride and a sense of legitimacy in being able to pay taxes through my practice. If I had the opportunity to advise my three-years-ago self just beginning the scheme, I wouldn’t have much to say, because I truly gave it my all—except perhaps to enjoy it more. In a meaningful way I saw it as my civic duty to be part of a unique inflection point in Irish art history, and hopefully the beginning of a greater one.
Can you give an example or examples of how your writing practice has developed over the past three years while in receipt of the BIA grant?
DT: This is the boring part of my spiel where I say my writing process hasn’t changed drastically over the three years. Crucially however, the grant has allowed me to adopt a process in which I’ve had faith for many years but which, until I received the grant, I was rarely in a position to maintain. This process is one of continually showing up to the desk or the outside world—whether for reading or writing or fieldwork—and trusting that, over time, the work will take care of itself and the writing will go where it needs to go. This, I’m aware, is more of a schedule than a process, but as far as schedules go I’ve found there are few that I prefer. It’s difficult to care, after all, about the emotional tenor of your final act or the dramatic architecture of your entire novel when your bank balance is low and you have errands to run and dinners to make.
CH: As a writer it has given me the chance to experiment and collaborate more, to follow stories with more freedom and importantly to let those stories breathe, to let ideas develop in their own time, to let them change and evolve. There is an expectation within the scheme, I think, that it will make artists more productive and profitable. Maybe that’s true for some. For me, it allowed me in some ways to be less productive but to make more meaningful work, giving me more freedom to write for independent publications, to reach new readers, to engage more with community. Some examples: I collaborated with photographers Clodagh O’Leary and Ala Buisir, wrote about the government excluding survivors from redress for The Ditch, brought artists and activists together for an event exploring what liberation means today, and am currently writing a piece for Airmid’s Journal about intersectional movements for change in Ireland. The Arts Council funding I received before the BIA paid me more and I haven’t applied for funding since being on the scheme, so in that sense it’s not even costing the state more. But suddenly I had years to dedicate to long-term creative projects without having to fit those ideas into a grant application, encouraging more complexity and depth in the stories I wanted to tell. Without it I also might have needed to go abroad for work again. With so many artists leaving this country because they can’t afford to stay, that’s a meaningful impact of the scheme. How many people has it kept living and creating here?
CB: For the first year of the BIA when I was working full-time, I drafted my first pamphlet, a selection of poems about working time entitled Pink roses, green, in the evenings and weekends. I was consumed by the need to write. Especially as an emerging writer, I felt that I only deserved this income if I was productive (this is despite no pressure from the scheme itself). In the second year, I spent a few months writing full-time. I had the time to complete the pamphlet, but without the time pressure, I found myself often stuck in a strange era of failed attempts at confessional poetry; to mature my writing, I thought, I would flay open my life. I wasn’t really ready. In hindsight, this period of writing badly was incredibly useful to me as a writer. Floundering, I took up part-time work, and allowing my writing brain to rest for two days a week felt exactly right. Suddenly, I was overcome with new ideas. Rather than expand my pamphlet into a collection as I had planned, I decided I would use the final year of the BIA to first experiment with narrative poetry, found text and fictional voices. I am in no rush to write this collection anymore. I am just grateful to have the time to try something new.
DM: I had the time and resources alike to write a novel—something I had dreamt of doing as a child, but had gradually let go of upon becoming an adult. Writing a book itself has opened new, deeper and darker pockets of myself and my practice that will stand to me beyond publication, though that too is a journey I am just beginning. The BIA further enabled my visual arts career to progress steadily, having now performed and staged work across the island and most recently internationally in Brussels. It has also led to being awarded an Arts Council Bursary Award and a residency at Fire Station Artist Studios. These opportunities enabled me to push my performance art practice, the medium I am most known for—but a medium which is notoriously difficult to sustain a career in. I was also able to host regular performance and movement workshops called Bodyjams in which I shared my skills with participants. I have been able to push my image-making through video, drawing and painting, physically and digitally. I’ve even explored music. Writing, however, is my original medium. I see it as a form of prayer or self-encoding: I do it every day. If it is not the heart of my practice, then it is very close, with anything from performances, paintings, or music often beginning for me with the written word. It is something I have always done, but it became more real to me upon beginning to write professionally for publications such as the Visual Artists’ News Sheet (VAN), which coincided both with a rediscovery of philosophy and being selected for the BIA. These eventually would be instrumental in the formation of a novel, which itself partially explores the realities of being an artist in contemporary Dublin.
In terms of your financial stability, are you still as reliant on the grant now as when you were first selected? Have you seen an increase in income from your artistic practice while being on the scheme?
DT: To be blatantly honest, yes, I am very much as reliant on the grant now. Part of that has to do with the cost of rent in Dublin, while another factor is that my artistic income is very sporadic, even if it has definitely increased over the course of the scheme. It’s probably worth stressing here for those who don’t know that ‘artistic income,’ in my case, almost exclusively consists of Arts Council funding and County Council grants and payments for literary events and prose publications; very little of it comes from book deals and royalties. It’s why opportunities like this are so essential: they give you a fighting chance of writing the next book.
CH: With the baby it is hard to find the same time to write, so the Basic Income is still a lifeline. When I found out I was pregnant, months into the scheme, I felt I had to inform them but I was also worried it would disqualify me–a bit like women excluded from scientific trials because their results are more complex. But luckily that wasn’t the case. With this support I feel responsibility, more than ever, to write in some way for the public good. This government might want to promote the scheme as turning artists into better money-makers and consumers. A more meaningful outcome, I think, is how the financial support helps foster experimentation and collaboration, encouraging work that engages more with communities and grassroots initiatives for change. The government should listen to unions like Praxis: The Artists’ Union of Ireland on financial stability for artists. In my experience, rates for writers, whether it’s for words or events or teaching, haven’t changed much, despite the cost of living. Match In The Dark, an initiative which published an author-led document on fair pay for writers in 2022, suggested rates that publicly funded work for writers is still failing to match.
CB: Short answers: yes and yes. Published poems do not pay thousands, to put it mildly. Even if the BIA continues, I will continue to work part-time. But importantly, the BIA has not only given me time to write, but the time to write funding applications, to get in touch with others and seek out opportunities. This has helped me enormously. And as the scheme has resulted in my pamphlet, I have been commissioned to write by festivals and organisations and asked to give readings, however ill-paid in the beginning. Nowhere else in the literary world, outside of academia and perhaps Rupi Kaur’s career, will emerging poets be paid €17,000 a year. Writers are not paid fairly.
I am lucky twice over: I do not have to pay rents on the private market as I live with my partner. When we first met I was doing a TEFL course to move abroad; I could not live in Ireland and avail of this scheme otherwise—my younger siblings for instance have emigrated for a better quality of life elsewhere. The BIA income, alongside working full-time and part-time, allowed me to save for the first time in my life after years of paying off loans. Having those savings allows me to think about money much more rationally, rather than in a panic and shame that obstructs planning for the future.
DM: In some ways I would say that I am as reliant as when I began, despite the increase in my income beyond the scheme itself. Part of this is due to living with a chronic illness, which has complicated my employability in the past. I have been able to, including the BIA, make more or less minimum wage per year from my practice, which is in fact an achievement. My career has also taken many steps forward which otherwise may not have been taken, but I must of course subsist. In truth, I have had to save most of what I received, anticipating making it last beyond the scheme for another year or two. In this way I perhaps didn’t relax in the same way other recipients did; if anything, I saw it as a professional call to arms. This is what many artists have to do anyway: say ‘yes’ to everything repeatedly, rarely investing the power of a professional ‘no’ in themselves. Our nos are sacred, as is art—artists should have the freedom to say no. Perpetual productivity is not creativity: it is a fear response, and for a professional artist, there are very real financial fears we repeatedly face.
In June 2025, the government announced a six-month extension to the pilot scheme, and committed to propose a future iteration after this point. What would you like to see happen next with the BIA? Both for yourself and more generally.
DT: I want to see the future iteration of the scheme go to as many artists as possible, namely those who weren’t selected to participate in the pilot scheme. I want the government to continue supporting the arts and arts inclusivity in Ireland, especially at a time where the country is awash with exclusionary rhetoric. Ultimately I want to see the BIA scheme become integral to the arts in Ireland (just as I want to see the Occupied Territories Bill become integral to Irish legislation) in the hopes, however slight, that other countries and governments will one day follow suit.
CH: Creative work is a public good that expands perspectives, strengthens communities and documents experiences. Given the positive impact on my life, I hope the Basic Income for the Arts will be continued and that it will be extended to all artists. Ultimately basic income should be universal, although without a right to affordable housing or caps on rents there’s nothing to stop prices increasing. Everyone on this island deserves the basic resources to live free from constant precarity. I feel uncomfortable about political parties that have overseen ever-rising homelessness and deepening inequality at a time of massive wealth, boasting about this scheme as proof of their progressiveness. I suspect some people in this government see artists as ‘scroungers,’ although ones with cultural capital. There is a classism in how people on other state supports are stigmatised, marginalised and limited in comparison. Artists on disability allowance and other forms of welfare had to worry about losing their supports if they took the Basic Income, while there was no means-testing for others. I face precarity as an artist but also come from a family who owns their own home, who are middle class, and could risk doing creative work in the first place to become an ‘established artist’ eligible for this scheme. Why am I treated as deserving when there are mothers working temporary contracts and struggling to keep a roof over their family’s heads, or people living in emergency accommodation or direct provision, who are often vilified for receiving state supports. There is literally a joke about ‘government artists’ who ‘draw the dole.’ So the Basic Income should never be a gag, as we are in a unique position as artists to publicly question these inequalities.
CB: I support the National Campaign for the Arts, which demands that the Basic Income be expanded dramatically for a wider group of artists, while retaining a high level of income. The BIA shouldn’t suffer the fate of many of the government’s quick-lived temporary support schemes for the cost of living. The arts require long-term, secure investment. It’s also incredibly unjust that carers and people with disabilities were subject to means-testing when applying for the BIA, and risked losing their social welfare payments if chosen for the scheme—effectively making many ineligible. I also hope that the BIA won’t be used by the government as a technocratic substitute for Arts Council funding, which in real terms, has not been increased for years. We are now seeing eligibility restrictions for vital supports like the Agility Award and huge competition for Literature Bursaries. We need both stable incomes for individuals and massively increased arts funding. And let’s not forget that arts funding in the North has suffered dramatic cuts despite Belfast being our capital city of poetry.
As for me, I’ve been incredibly lucky. The BIA has felt like what free secondary education did for my parents’ generation, what social housing had done for my grandparents’. Over the past year, I have become more involved in Praxis: the Artists’ Union of Ireland to organise with others to fight for arts funding. I have also found comrades similarly energised over this issue in Frustrated Writers’ Group. I would love to stay on the Basic Income scheme, with the security it grants my life; I would also like to live in a society where artists’ dignity is not decided by a state lottery, but fought for and won by us ourselves.
DM: I was of course relieved to know that the scheme was being extended, but I also hope that this is not simply gestural. We have no idea how long a future proposal will take to legislate and enact, not to mention the nature of it and who will be in power by the time this happens. I would like to see investment in individual artists and artist collectives, not in more bureaucracies which do not reflect artists’ lived professional realities. We have yet again as a country a unique opportunity to innovate on the world stage. I would like to give my culture the best I have to give, which I was only able to give with this scheme. I would like to see bravery on the part of legislators, to extend a new scheme to all professional artists across all stages of their career and discipline(s) of choice.
The National Campaign for the Arts (NCFA) is currently leading a nationwide initiative calling on the government to retain, extend and expand the scheme in the next budget.
The national outreach campaign undertaken by the NCFA urges government officials, local representatives, and key stakeholders to support funding the BIA on a permanent basis.
The NCFA launched the initiative in June following the publication of a government report which showed the pilot scheme’s general success.
The NCFA asks members of the arts community and the public to actively support the campaign, including contacting their local TDs and representatives. For full information, and a link to a draft email for your local representative, visit NCFA.ie. To join your local constituency group to help build grassroots support to permanently retain the BIA, email info@ncfa.ie.