Workers of The World Unite For A Basic Income!

I did not plan on posting this for Labor Day until this morning when I was closing out my drafts folder. This was one of the newest items, being from in the folder since 8/10.

The problem facing me about writing anything about Basic Income for the Arts: What happens next? (The Stinging Fly) was that there was no way any state government would consider the idea. Pay artists for making art? Such silliness. We don't need no stinking art. We will just take whatever washes up on the shore. As for the federal government, it hates the arts as not providing any profitable returns for MAGA. (But what if the artists were making gold replicas of Donald J. "Cankles" Trump?)

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.

Ireland has good reasons for supporting their writers. Haven't its writers created Ireland? Typing the names of Seamus Heaney, James Joyce, Brendan Behan, Sean O'Casey, William Butler Yeats, Sally Rooney, and Samuel Beckett only scratches the surface. But how much did they add to the nation's GDP?

I meant to point out the stability and dignity Ireland gave to its writers.

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. 

What does America care about stability and the dignity of its workers? We're kicking people off public assistance, not adding them. Our governments do not care what instability comes to its citizens' lives through losing medical or food assistance. Our government must take care of the much-abused, overly-sensitive billionaires. 

Workers don't need dignity, they need to pick a second or third job, so that they can keep feeding the billionaires.

Besides, give people a basic income, and they'll just loaf and play games on their smartphones. You'll find that out from the stories written about it (Universal Basic Income in Science Fiction, What Science Fiction Can Teach Us About Universal Basic Income by Will Truman (Arc Digital | Medium), The Expanse's Basic Support vs. Basic Income, and Science fiction novels for economists - Noahpinion)

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: 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.

Yeah, such a lazy bunch of leeches. 

Let the Irish promote their culture to the world and make their own lives more congenial, such silliness.

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. 

Well, we all know the bravery of American legislators. Why should America innovate on the world state with anything but tariffs and threats of tariffs.

It's not like Ernest Hemingway, Eugene O'Neill, William Faulkner, Saul Bellow, Sinclair Lewis, John Steinbeck, Toni Morrison, or Bob Dylan did anything to improve this country or its standing in the world.

As for Indiana, whoever heard of any author coming from Indiana (Indiana Authors | Monroe County Public Library, Indiana - mcpl.info, Category:Writers from Indiana - Wikipedia, Indiana Authors Books, 52 books named to 2024 Indiana Authors Awards shortlists - Indiana Humanities, Hoosier Hall of Fame: The Indiana Authors - Indianapolis Monthly) that we should nurture them with a basic income?

No, what I think after reading the Stinging Fly interview is this: everyone having to work for a living should get a basic income. Stop letting us be economically blackmailed by politicians and our bosses. It can't cost any more than helping billionaires maintain their style of life.

sch 8/19

 

You can find the Irish The Arts Council here,

sch 8/22 

 And does the United States government do for writers?

NEA cancels decades-long creative writing fellowship (NPR)

 Alice Walker. Charles Bukowski. Louise Erdrich. Juan Felipe Herrera. These are just some of the authors who received a Creative Writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts over the years. The fellowship has now been canceled.

The annual program was set up in 1966 to help foster American fiction, non-fiction and poetry. The latest iteration of the fellowship offered fiction and creative non-fiction writers a $50,000 grant. Applications were due in March and notifications were set to go out in December. But last week, notices were sent to applicants stating: "The NEA has cancelled the FY 2026 Creative Writing Fellowships program."

sch 8/26