How €325 a month changed my life – I've never taken it for granted
In August 2022, after two years of pandemic shutdowns, the arts sector in Ireland was on its knees. It hadn't been doing too well before
Covid-19
, but in the face of a global virus, it all but evaporated. Government restrictions forced cinemas, theatres, performance venues, galleries and any arts-related spaces to shut down. Tens of thousands of people
lost their jobs
, myself included. In an already struggling sector, it was the death knell for the careers of many artists and arts workers.
After tireless work by the National Campaign for the Arts and Theatre Forum, former minister for arts Catherine Martin announced the introduction of a
Basic Income for the Arts
(BIA) scheme. This was to be a three-year research project, funded by the EU, funnelled through the Irish government. It would cost between €150,000-€200,000. Out of 8,000 eligible applicants, 2,000 were selected in an anonymised and randomised process. I was one of those 2,000 people.
The BIA was an intervention to try to save a sinking ship. The severe impact of the pandemic on artists and arts workers was preceded by years of financial cuts and dwindling budgets. The sector had suffered massive cuts during the 2008 recession, and funding never made its way back up to pre-recession levels. In short, being an artist in Ireland has meant living precariously, frequently working for below minimum wage, and often working for free.
Let's take a deep breath together and move in time to the fateful moment that was 2020. It's impossible for me to see this number without feeling a shudder down my spine. And yet, before it became that unforgettable year in history, for me it was one of great hope and excitement. 2020 was going to be
my
year. I had worked very hard for more than 20 years to build the momentum I was finally reaping. After decades of failures, successes, more failures, rejections, heartaches, near misses and
almost-
theres, I was staring down the barrel of a good year. No, a
great
year. Following a critically acclaimed, sold-out run in 2019, a play I'd written, This Beautiful Village, was going back into the Abbey Theatre for production on the main stage for one month. After that, there would be a national tour. I got a publishing deal, I signed with a new agent at a big agency in London, and
This Beautiful Village won Best New Play at the Irish Theatre Awards
. This glorious moment had been a long time coming for me. And then, in a heartbeat, it all disappeared … poof … into thin air.
READ MORE
At the time, people were at pains to assure me that my show would come back once restrictions were lifted, that all would be righted. None of these people worked in the arts or entertainment. They did not understand that in this business, when you lose your slot, it's gone. As the pandemic raged on, the Abbey changed leadership, and I was not part of their new agenda. This is how it goes in showbiz.
I spent a long, long time grieving this loss. And while I was not alone – many of my peers had also lost their work – it was an intensely lonely and solitary grief. I was the only person in my family who lost everything overnight. It was also an ambiguous loss. I couldn't point to something tangible and feel its absence, because it didn't happened. It was a 'supposed to be', sliding doors moment in my life. How can you miss something you never actually had?
I sank into a deep depression. I felt broken. And to top it all off, I was sick. The week of the very first shutdown, I had surgery and was diagnosed with endometriosis. In addition to grief and loss, I was in constant, severe pain. My livelihood was gone, along with my identity, my sense of self. And I got completely and utterly lost in it all.
I spent two years battling with my grief, and fighting for healthcare to treat my illness. I wasn't doing well with either. I'd heard rumours that a Basic Income for the Arts scheme was coming down the line but I wasn't going to hold my breath. When an official announcement arrived, and applications opened, I put my name forward, knowing full well that my chances were slim. A lot of arts sector workers were in a bad way, and I was by no means the worst. I was able to rent a home near my daughter's school, and was able to put food on the table. Not everybody had it that good.
When I received word I'd been selected, a light went on inside me. The money would be a huge boost, of course, but also, I felt seen. I felt valued. As a writer, as an artist, that's not something you feel very often. Artists expend so much energy fighting for their worth to be adequately compensated that it's very easy to lose your sense of self-worth and belief. These are not flowery words, or luxury feelings, they are fundamental to the health and wellbeing of every human being.
When someone shows you that they believe in you, as the BIA did for me, it shifts you on your axis. In a society that devalues artists, yet consumes art every single day, a sliver of belief can make a seismic shift in the person who creates that art. It turns out that €325 a week can not only help with groceries and doctors' bills, it also makes you feel like you're worth something. That the creativity you contribute to the world is, in fact, meaningful.
[
'Life changing' income scheme for artists means more spend time on work and fewer suffer from depression
Opens in new window
]
That first BIA payment I received came at a very dark time in my life. It was a ray of light, a beacon of hope that maybe,
maybe
, I'd be able to keep writing. Qualified to do exactly zero else, the only path for me was forward. There was guilt, of course. Selection had been randomised but, as I've said, there had been 8,000 applications. Only 2,000 were selected. I carried a sense of shame, that there were others more deserving than me. And nobody,
nobody
, who was selected talked about it. It was an unspoken agreement. Don't ask, don't tell. That's how dire things have gotten for artists in Ireland.
Every month, a payment would go straight into my bank account. In the three years I've been part of this scheme, I've never once taken that money for granted. In tough times, when doctors' bills skyrocketed, those payments took the edge off a sharp knife. They gave me breathing space to try to navigate writing while sick and in pain during a pandemic. Even as the dreaded restrictions began to lift, and we put distance between ourselves and the darkest days of the pandemic, that €325 continued to help with medical bills. It bought me time and space to process total career loss, chronic illness and allowed me to wedge the door open to keep writing, in whatever way I could.
Every six months, there was a survey. It asked questions about my life demographics, things you would expect to answer: age, living situation, employment status, a lot of standard queries about where I was at. What I did not expect were the questions about my mental health and wellbeing. In a gentle, respectful way, it made me reflect on how I was really doing. There were the questions about care and household responsibilities. My answers to those blew my mind. It was galling to realise how much time I was spending on running a household and it was news to me to discover that with the hours I was putting in, I was, in fact, a stay-at-home mother. The purpose of the survey was to gather information, but what it did was wake me up to the domestic inequity in my household, and take a good hard look at how I was spending my time.
'How much time did you spend on leisure activities this month?' On at least three of the surveys, my answer was zero. Had it not been for this research element of the project, I'm not sure I would have ever realised this. Writing another zero next to a question about how much money I'd made from my specific art form (playwriting) forced me to have some very difficult conversations with myself.
Most artists in Ireland cannot make a living from making art alone. They have to subsidise their income with jobs in other sectors, or if they're lucky, in an arts-related role. In 2024, an estimated 6.6 million tourists visited our island. They didn't all come for the Guinness. And they certainly didn't come for the weather. Our scenery is gorgeous, yes, even in the rain, but what really draws people to Ireland is our culture. Our music, our writers, our art, our theatre, our festivals, these are what make Ireland such a popular place to visit. And when they do, they spend money. Lots of it. So why are the folks that make that culture living on the breadline?
The economics of culture are simple: if you build it, they will come. In their droves. They'll spend money in pubs, hotels, galleries, theatres, shops, landmarks and museums. They'll buy books and woolly hats and green hoodies and shillelaghs and Claddagh rings and records and brown bread. They'll splash the cash to immerse themselves in the full experience of the immense culture of Ireland. But culture doesn't build itself. It requires time, talent and dedication. And the people who make that culture can't do it if they can't make the rent, or they can't afford to take their sick kid to the doctor, or they can't afford a space or studio.
The poetry that politicians love to quote to humanise themselves doesn't magic up out of nowhere. The TV shows you can't stop binge-watching don't make themselves. The books you read were not written by an AI bot. Someone, an artist, had to sit down at a desk, likely for years, and grind that sucker out. For a pittance. The music you love to listen to started in an artist's head and made its way out on to an instrument. That instrument costs money. The recording equipment and studio space cost more. Like it or not, art needs money, because the people who make it are human beings who need the same things as you: shelter, food and water, yes. But they also need to be valued enough to invest in.
[
The Irish Times view on basic income for artists: keep it going
Opens in new window
]
The Basic Income for the Arts scheme was due to end in August but it has been extended until February 2026. Minister for Culture, Communications and Sport, Patrick O'Donovan TD, plans to bring proposals for a 'successor scheme' to Cabinet as part of Budget 2026.
Economically, the return on a BIA scheme will pay huge dividends in the form of more art, which will grow the tourism industry which will grow the hospitality, service, and retail industries. As an investment, it's a no brainer. And those are pretty thin on the ground these days.
Lisa Tierney-Keogh is a playwright and writer
lisatierneykeogh.substack.com
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Irish Times
5 hours ago
- Irish Times
Collected Poems by Gerard Fanning: Elliptical, at times cryptic works built on mood and atmosphere
Collected Poems Author : Gerard Fanning ISBN-13 : 978-1943667154 Publisher : Wake Forest University Press Guideline Price : £19.99 I hadn't come across the late Gerard Fanning's work before encountering it whole, as it were, in the shape of this Collected Poems. It comes with helpful apparatus – a foreword by Gerald Dawe, an afterword by Colm Tóibín – a contemporary and friend of Fanning's at UCD – and an interview with Fanning and Conor O'Callaghan. All of these angles are helpful, perhaps even essential, to the new reader of his writing. These poems are elliptical, at times cryptic; they mostly don't so much perform as talk quietly into their shirt sleeves, operating in an air of manila envelopes and uncompromisingly referential Europhilia; they're lit by a sort of coastal glare, and often feel as if they're squinting under exposed scrutiny. Tóibín rightly says that poetry wasn't – for Fanning – Auden's 'memorable speech', and these are poems built on mood, atmospheres – his avowed Derek Mahon and Paul Muldoon admiration hint at his wide range of references, from film and literature to something more playfully esoteric, more guardedly private and coded. He was a government man, a life of 'benign Glengarry Glen Ross', in his own words; on the road, and on the right side of intrusion. On the page, too. If the early work from the 1990s has an abiding flavour it's one of withdrawal and departure, a sort of whistling chilliness, looking for – as per one of the best of his early poems An Evening in Booterstown – 'a pale permanence'. READ MORE He has something of Tom Waits to his titles – often proper names, recognisable or otherwise, are thrown around; we're located but we're left out a little too – this is a poetry of overhearing, eschewing careless talk, or the loose lip. [ From the archive: Poet and Rooney Prize winner Gerard Fanning dies Opens in new window ] At times in the first books he can exclude us entirely – one feels the need to ask for a primer, or Rosetta Stone, for some of his piled-up enigmas, but later he seems to relax into a more open, approachable clarity. Rhyme comes in, but by Slip Road his language as a whole is, largely, more open, more parseable – poems like These Days allying a new clarity to an encroaching sense of creeping dread, spotlighting a melancholy undertow that was always there, tidal like so many of his landscapes – 'I will be sent for, soon, at night'.
Irish Times
5 hours ago
- Irish Times
Book of condolences for Henry Mount Charles opens at Slane Castle
The grounds of Slane Castle in Co Meath were opened to the public on Saturday to allow people celebrate the life of Lord Henry Mount Charles, who died earlier this week . The 74-year-old, who is best known for staging rock concerts at his home in Slane, died at St James's Hospital on Wednesday from cancer. He was first diagnosed with lung cancer more than a decade ago. In a statement, his son Alex Conyngham, the Marquess Conyngham, expressed his gratitude for the 'countless expressions of sympathy and shared memories'. 'Dad's warmth, spirit and dedication to Slane, its people and its legacy forged friendships that extended incredibly far and wide. The depth of feeling shown is a testament to the extraordinary connections he made throughout his life.' READ MORE A book of condolences will be available for signing at Slane Castle this weekend. The grounds are open until 6pm on Saturday and from 10am to 6pm on Sunday. [ Ireland was a rock'n'roll backwater when Henry Mount Charles brought Dylan, Springsteen and The Rolling Stones to Slane Opens in new window ] The family say this will be an opportunity for all those who knew Lord Henry, enjoyed the magic of Slane or simply wish to express their sympathies to come together in his memory at the place he loved deeply. The 8th Marquess Conyngham is survived by his wife Iona, children Alex, Henrietta, Wolfe and Tamara, his brothers Patrick and Simon, family and friends. He will lie in repose at Slane Castle on Tuesday. Those wishing to pay their respects are invited to do so between 3pm and 7pm. A funeral service will take place on Wednesday at noon in St Patrick's Church of Ireland, Slane. Due to very limited space inside the Church, seating will be reserved and allocated for family, with provision made for those outside.
Irish Times
8 hours ago
- Irish Times
Zach Bryan in Phoenix Park: Plenty of welly as yeehaw comes to Dublin
Zach Bryan Phoenix Park, Dublin ★★★★☆ Yeehaw arrived in the Phoenix Park on Friday night for the first of Zach Bryan 's three shows this weekend and there was plenty of welly given from all involved. The American country singer-songwriter and rock musician played to a sold-out crowd of 60,000, with a lot of cowboy hats and boots, lace, denim and fringes in attendance. In fact, the vibe was perfectly summed up by two people behind us on the 50-ish minute walk in from the Heuston Luas stop: 'If you look out, you just see a crowd of people,' the woman says, 'and they all look the same.' A man replies: 'Even the lads – all in T-shirts and shorts – and there's always someone too drunk to get in.' In fairness, the scorching weather certainly called for shorts and the boho-cowboy look many of the women were going for, combined with the sticky heat, gave the lengthy stroll down Chesterfield Avenue a feeling of the US music festival Coachella, which takes place in the desert. READ MORE Photograph: Alan Betson/The Irish Times Days after the death of Henry Mount Charles , one can't help but be reminded of the long trek through Slane for the many legendary concerts there and, inside, the queues for most food and drink merchants are similar to those of the Meath venue – long, winding and feel as if they are ever-growing. Indeed, one concertgoer remarked that they were in the queue for the bar for an hour. A ticket for Bryan does not come cheap – upwards of €120 at the time of the initial sale and much more now for resale – so spending a lot of that time waiting isn't ideal. Photograph: Alan Betson/The Irish Times That being said, Bryan himself certainly gave fans their money's worth, coming on stage just after 8pm and playing until the 10.30pm curfew. Those at Charli XCX this week in Malahide unfortunately couldn't say the same . His onstage band include trumpets, fiddles, piano, double bass and a multitude of others – most wearing western-style outfits and cowboy hats, which all tied in the howdy vibes perfectly next to Bryan's more subdued short-sleeved shirt and trousers. Photograph: Alan Betson/The Irish Times The Oklahoma man has a real southern charm to him and comes across incredibly endearing as he repeatedly thanks the audience and smiling when they are audibly singing along with the likes of Pink Skies – which some may recognise from TikTok – and Something in the Orange, in particular. He offers some titbits from his life between the songs while sipping on a can of Budweiser. Bryan's songs also carry a deep romance to them, reflected in the crowd with couples hugging and swaying together. There is swinging and dancing during the livelier ones too, such as Nine Ball and the encore's Revival. The show's visuals are effective, too, and change throughout the set. Expect all the bells and whistles at the end in the form of fireworks. Photograph: Alan Betson/The Irish Times Overall, it's a charming performance filled with references to good old American culture, without all of the politics. Bryan really feels like the Garth Brooks of the next generation – though he'd probably qualify for a cooler comparison of Bruce Springsteen. If you're heading to the show tonight or tomorrow, make sure to drink a lot of water – as Bryan himself had to stop the show to make sure a fan was okay after an incident reminding the crowd of the very same message. And maybe leave the cowboy boots at home as there were many soiled socks on the way home as the footwear became too unbearable for the long journey in and out.
