There is “enormous distress” among current recipients of the pilot Basic Income for Arts (BIA) programme following the announcement of the new scheme, artists have said.
BIA Artist’s Alliance, made up of 65 artists who currently avail of the scheme, said while it welcomed its continuation, many are now “being thrown back into precarity and deprivation and unable to afford our rent”.
The successor scheme to the BIA pilot scheme was announced on Tuesday. It will see 2,000 eligible artists selected to receive the payment of €325 per week.
The payment will be for three years and will also feature a tapering-off period of three months at the end of the cycle.
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The new scheme will operate in three-year cycles with artists being eligible for every three out of six years. This means that, if selected in 2026 to 2029 for the payment, an artist won’t be eligible for the payment in the next cycle, but may reapply in the cycle following that.
Those who were on the pilot who meet the eligibility criteria for the new scheme may apply for the BIA in 2026.
In a statement, BIA Artist’s Alliance said they have come to rely on and “build our lives around” the scheme.
“To drop supports for the 2,000 pilot participants is a waste of the State’s investment and of the artists momentum,” it said.
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The group has called for the scheme to be retained for all current participants and extended to all eligible artists “as soon as possible”.
Minister for Culture Patrick O’Donovan has said he would like to increase the number of people availing of the basic income for the arts scheme over the coming years as well as the level of payment.
The scheme will open for applications in May and these will be assessed over the summer, with payment to selected artists beginning “before the end of 2026″.
Artists who participated in the pilot project, which was extended by six months last year, are due to receive their final payments this month.
O’Donovan said the scheme was only available to 2,000 artists due to budget constraints from the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform and this was a “fairly sizeable amount of people”.
“I hope to be able to grow that over the next couple of years, and that will obviously involve negotiations between myself and the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform and our department officials. But it is an aspiration of mine over the lifetime of the Government, over the next four to five years, to try and increase that number, because I can see very clearly from the metrics just how important it is,” he said.
O’Donovan said eligible artists would be chosen by random selection and his department officials would complete inspections and audits “during a period of time to make sure that we have people that are at the end of the day working to their full potential”.
Social Democrats TD Sinéad Gibney said while plans for a new scheme were welcome, they had been “undermined by the Government’s shoddy treatment of existing recipients”.
The Dublin-Rathdown TD said artists participating in the pilot project were now facing “a financial cliff edge”.
“These payments are due to end this month, and it is completely unacceptable that a successor scheme is not likely to be in place until at least September,” she said.
“This has caused considerable anxiety to artists who don’t know if they will be eligible or given priority for the next phase of the scheme. Given that this gap was predictable and avoidable, it is difficult to understand the Government’s lack of planning. It is a slap in the face for those artists who now have to wait until applications open for the replacement scheme to learn if they will qualify.”
