Everything Is State-Funded

There is a polite fiction at the heart of Irish public debate about arts funding: that the arts are somehow exceptional in their dependence on the state. That they require “subsidy”, while other sectors thrive on the market. This is simply not true. In reality, everything is state funded – either visibly through direct expenditure, or invisibly through the tax system. The difference is not whether the state intervenes, but which sectors are allowed to call that intervention “normal economic policy”.

Once this fiction is abandoned, the question of arts investment changes completely. The issue is no longer whether the arts deserve public money, but why the state persistently refuses to apply the same policy instruments to culture that it routinely applies to, for example, industry, property and finance.

The hidden state: tax expenditures as public spending

The Department of Finance is quite explicit on this point: tax expenditures are public spending delivered through the tax system. They are not marginal tweaks; they are fiscal decisions with real opportunity costs. Based on a preliminary search in 2024, tax expenditures in Ireland amounted to approximately €8 billion – roughly 2% of national income and around 8% of total tax revenue. That figure alone should end any claim that Ireland is a low-intervention state.

Crucially, these supports are highly concentrated. Roughly 70% of all tax expenditures are accounted for by just ten measures. The single largest is the R&D tax credit, with revenue foregone of approximately €1.4 billion per annum (this mostly benefits the multi-national sector) This is not an incidental policy choice; it is a deliberate and ongoing act of industrial strategy.

What makes tax expenditures politically convenient is precisely what makes them democratically fragile: they are less visible, less scrutinised, and less debated than voted spending. They rarely appear in annual budget narratives as “expenditure”, even though that is exactly what they are. The section 481 film tax credit is essentially a check written by Revenue to a small cohort of producers. When the state backs industry through the tax code, it is described as competitiveness. When it backs housing, it is described as market support. When it backs finance, it is described as stability. When the arts seek funding, it is described as subsidy.

This “asymmetry” is not economic. It is ideological. It is funding used as power and control.

Industrial policy is not controversial—unless it’s cultural.

Ireland already runs an extensive and unapologetic industrial policy. Direct state aid through agencies such as IDA Ireland and Enterprise Ireland includes grant support, equity participation, capital funding and risk-sharing instruments. IDA alone operates an annual grant programme in the region of €100 million, while Enterprise Ireland administers large-scale venture and seed capital schemes, including a €250 million state-backed fund.

At EU level, this approach is entirely orthodox. The European Commission’s State Aid Scoreboard shows that tax advantages, grants and guarantees are standard instruments across Member States, with the overwhelming majority of aid explicitly directed towards agreed policy priorities. State aid is not an anomaly; it is the machinery of modern government.

What is striking is not that the state intervenes so heavily in the economy—but that culture is persistently excluded from this logic, treated instead as a discretionary add-on, funded primarily through small, contested, and hyper-visible budget lines.

Property, finance and the myth of the “free market”

Housing policy provides the clearest illustration of how deeply the state already shapes markets through fiscal means. Measures such as Help to Buy, rent tax credits, and mortgage-related reliefs are not neutral interventions. They actively structure demand, prices and investment behaviour. Whether one agrees with their effects or not is beside the point. The key insight is this: the tax system is already being used as a primary policy lever in the property market.

Similarly, finance and pensions are underpinned by extensive tax reliefs that primarily benefit those with sufficient income or assets to avail of them. These are rarely framed as subsidies, despite their scale and distributive impact. They are treated as part of the natural order of the economy.

Against this backdrop, claims that the arts represent a special burden on the public purse are not just weak—they are intellectually dishonest.

The arts problem is not “too much subsidy”, but the wrong instruments

The arts in Ireland are already state funded – but badly. Funding is fragmented, short-term, risk-averse, and overly focused on individual artists rather than sectoral capacity. It relies almost entirely on direct grants, which are politically exposed and administratively over-burdened. Meanwhile, the state withholds the very instruments it routinely uses elsewhere: tax credits, capital allowances, investment reliefs, and demand-side incentives.

This produces predictable outcomes:

chronic under-investment in production, touring and presentation;

weak organisational balance sheets;

loss of technical and producing skills;

over-reliance on individual precarity masked as “artistic freedom”.

The result is not a sustainable cultural sector, but a welfare-adjacent ecosystem permanently in crisis mode.

Towards a mixed funding model using standard state tools

The alternative is neither radical nor risky. It is simply policy consistency.

If the state accepts that tax expenditures are legitimate tools for building industrial capacity, then the arts should be supported through a blended model combining increased direct funding with aggressive, well-designed tax incentives. These incentives should not be symbolic or boutique; they should mirror existing instruments in scale, structure and seriousness.

For example, this could include:

Production and touring tax credits, led by venues and presenters, to stabilise employment and regional circulation; Accelerated capital allowances for cultural infrastructure, equipment, accessibility and decarbonisation; Commissioning and workforce “credits” to rebuild the technical and producing middle layers of the sector; Capped cultural investment reliefs to mobilise private capital without creating tax shelters; Demand-side participation credits, targeted to broaden access rather than subsidise elite consumption.

Each of these instruments already exists elsewhere in the system. None requires new ideological ground. All can be capped, sunsetted, evaluated and regionally weighted. What is missing is not technical feasibility, but political imagination.

The real question: what does the state think arts and culture is for?

Ultimately, this is not an argument about “generosity”. It is an argument about what the state believes culture does.

If culture is understood as foundational infrastructure—shaping identity, place, democratic capacity and social resilience—then under-investing in it while lavishly supporting other sectors is not prudent. It is incoherent.

The Irish state already funds the economy everywhere. The only real question is whether it is prepared to admit that culture is part of that economy, and to fund it with the same seriousness, sophistication and confidence it applies elsewhere.

Anything less is not “fiscal realism”, It is , arguably, cultural negligence.