Catherine Martin: “The BIA payment is having a consistent, positive impact"

The Minister for Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media, Catherine Martin, used the recent The Status Of The Artist conference in Dublin to reveal the findings of the Basic Income For The Arts: Impact Assessment (First Year) Report.

Launched in 2022, the Basic Income for the Arts (BIA) pilot scheme has resulted in 2,000 randomly chosen artists and creative arts workers receiving payments of €325 a week for three years.

There’s also a control group of 1,000 people who missed out on the BIA but have agreed to self-report data to the department.

“I would like to say at the outset how important the arts are to me personally,” the Minister said in her keynote speech at The Alex Hotel. “All my life, I have loved the arts, especially music and our traditional arts, which have a special place in my heart.  I have always known the importance of music and art in enriching our lives and enhancing our wellbeing.  So it was a particular privilege for me to become Minister with responsibility for the arts.

“The signature innovation of this Government in terms of publicly funded support for our artists is the Basic Income for the Arts pilot scheme,” she continued. “Previous surveys have pointed to precarious incomes being all too common for artists. Therefore, the delivery of the Basic Income for the Arts has been a key priority for me.  I believe that this is a once in a generation policy intervention that has the potential to transform the lives of artists.

“Today, I am publishing a paper analysing the impact of the basic income over the first full year since its inception.  The research shows that positive impacts for those receiving the payment materialised fairly quickly within the first six months of the pilot.  A year on, the BIA payment is having a consistent, positive impact across almost all indicators; affecting practice development, sectoral retention, well-being and deprivation.”

Minister Martin went on to list such key findings as:

• Each week, BIA recipients spend 8 hours more on their practice
• They spend less time working in other sectors
• Recipients are more likely than the control group to be able to sustain themselves through arts work alone
• Life satisfaction increased for BIA recipients compared to the control group
• Depression and anxiety decreased for recipients
• Recipients were less likely to have difficulty making ends meet compared to the control group
• Recipients invest each month €550 more than the control group in their practice, namely on equipment and materials, advertising and marketing, workspaces, and work travel
• Recipients are more likely to have completed new works in the previous six months

UNSUNG HEROES

Working our way through the report, Hot Press was also struck by such number-crunching  as: “BIA recipients are less likely to have felt downhearted or depressed, and over 8% less likely to have experienced anxiety compared to the control” and: “BIA recipients are on average 18.8% less likely to have difficulty making ends meet compared to the control group.”

Putting that into personal context, a recipient of the BIA, Sligo artist Tom Mescal, told Hot Press: “It’s been life-changing for us as a family. Speaking to my colleagues that have also got the BIA, it’s just been huge. It’s being seen and valued as an artist. We’ve had better quality of life and more success in our work because we can put more time into it.

“I spoke to someone who’d been on social welfare and segued into the scheme who said it’s given them their sense of identity back and got them re-engaged with their local community,” Tom continues. “Doing the review process has, we all agree, been a hugely positive part of the scheme because we’ve got to self-evaluate and see actually how much we’ve been doing on a daily basis.

“It’d be amazing to see it rolled out to all those other people who qualify for the scheme but weren’t picked for the pilot.”

Asked whether the BIA pilot scheme is election-proof, Minister Martin told Hot Press that the impact assessment report had been positively received by her Cabinet colleagues and that funding for the next two years of the pilot is “ring-fenced.”

Indeed, the only potential threat to the scheme would be if a bunch of the  rural “independents” got too strong a say in government.

Deviating from her speech about the success of the BIA, the Minister said: “Another issue that I think is timely to discuss, is that of freedom of expression for artists.  This has become particularly relevant with the ongoing conflict in Gaza, and many Irish artists have taken strong positions boycotting and withdrawing from events in response to the crisis.

“The Irish Government, along with Spain and Norway, will tomorrow formally recognise the State of Palestine. This is a historic moment for Palestine, one that chimes with our own history in Ireland when, in 1919, we asked the world to recognise our status as an independent State and our right to self-determination. Our recognition of Palestine as a State is a strong statement that we wish the same for the people of Palestine.

“I want to reiterate the utmost respect I have for artists’ freedom of expression as artists, which is fundamental to their role as agents of change in society,” she continued. “Freedom of expression for artists is an essential part of a properly functioning democracy. It’s essential for us to have a diversity of voices and people willing to hold a lens up to society and reflect back what is happening.”

In addition to their blanket boycotting in March of South By Southwest due to one of the main sponsors being the US Army, Irish artists like CHERYM, Sarah Crean, Rachel Lavelle, Anna Mieke and Annika Kilkenny also pulled out of last month’s Great Escape showcase festival in Brighton because of its links to Barclays Bank. The UK-based Palestine Solidarity Campaign has accused Barclays of “bankrolling Israel’s genocidal assault on Palestinians through its financial ties with arms companies that sell weapons to Israel.”

Returning to the BIA, Catherine Martin hailed the control group as “the unsung heroes” of the pilot scheme; described the research into it as “gold standard”; and revealed that she’s had meetings with officials at Westminster and the New Zealand Culture Minister about it.

The conference’s first live music of the day was supplied by Wyvern Lingo’s Karen Cowley, currently flying solo as Krea, whose newfound mastery of the harp was made possible by her 2022 Arts Council Bursary Award.

Krea. Credit: Susannah Appleby

Joining her on the exquisite ‘The Callows’ and ‘Grief’ was Elliot Murphy, a Berlin-based cellist who’d flown home not only for this The Status Of The Artist performance, but also for Karen’s wedding later in the week.

Like many other Irish artists, Murphy is exiled in the German capital. Another delegate pointed out that it’s now cheaper to live in London where the likes of Nell Mescal, Orla Gartland, Lucy Blue, Kynsy, Ailbhe Reddy, Fontaines D.C. and Picture This are currently based.

BEING A PARENT

Also stepping up to the mic was Adam Mohamed, a spoken word artist from Ballymun who revealed how receiving the BIA has given him room to breathe as an artist  - and spend some quality time with his newborn.

Adam, a Hot Press fave who’s off soon to Berlin for the Zeitgeist festival, has followed Denise Chaila, Lankum and Felispeaks in having his work featured in both the Junior and Leaving Certs.

His performances today of ‘Untitled’ and ‘Dublin State Of Mind’, which cheekily borrows from Grandmaster Flash and The Furious Five’s ‘The Message’, should be mandatory listening for not just schoolkids, but anyone concerned about the current state of our nation.

Affordable housing for artists – or the lack thereof – was also addressed in a presentation by Colin McDonnell, the Director of the Irish Self Organised Architecture not-for-profit.

He pointed to the likes of La Borda in Barcelona and R50 and Spreefeld in – surprise, surprise! – Berlin as examples of successful cooperative housing projects that have been undertaken by artists.

Key to this has been the support of Spanish and German financial institutions who don’t view creatives with the suspicion that their Irish counterparts seem to.

During the Making Space For The Arts panel discussion, we learned that 67% of the general Irish population are home-owners – a figure that drops to just 33% when applied to the arts community. With only 2,000 rental properties currently listed on DAFT, it’s easy to understand why so many artists are moving abroad or are trapped at home with their parents. In one of the day’s most poignant contributions, panelist Aoibhéann McCann spoke about her financial struggles.

“I had to move out of Dublin in order to have a decent personal life,” she said. “I’ve been an actor for ten years and a writer for the last couple. At the start of the year for the first three months, I had no work whatsoever. I was going into savings and trying to figure out how to maintain my life.

“This is a really, really vulnerable thing to say, but I put off being a parent because of being an artist. Lots of actors and writers and artists, we noticed that they tend to put off parenthood. I think housing is at the centre of that. You don’t want to bring a person into the world if you can’t provide for them.”

The nods of recognition from the crowd as she said this suggest that it’s incumbent on whoever ends up in government next to extend the BIA or risk mass migration from the sector.

Moderated by RTÉ Radio One’s Seán Rocks who clearly knew the terrain, the conference also addressed such key areas as Artists and Climate Action; Artists with Disabilities; Artists working through the Irish Language; Artists as drivers of the nightime economy; and Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) in the Arts.

All in all, a thoroughly enjoyable and constructive gathering of the creative clans.

• Find out more about Self Organised Architecture at soa.ie