The proposed Culture Card is such a bad policy idea that I had to write a blog about it – and I have work to do!
So, very quickly, the Government has decided that a great intervention into the perpetually underfunded, perpetually crisis ridden arts and culture sector is a €100 “Culture Card” for every 16-year-old in the country. That’s about 70,000 teenagers, at a first-year cost of roughly €7.5 million, with an extension to 17-year-olds planned for Budget 2028. Fianna Fail were claiming this as their initiative on the radio on Monday but the idea has an impeccable pedigree. Before the 2024 election Fine Gael proposed a €300 version; Sinn Féin floated a €130 card back around 2016, and a Fianna Fáil TD suggested a €100 card at age 18 – I’m not quite sure when. The Programme for Government duly promised to examine one. Well here it is and unfortunately they clearly didn’t bother to “examine” it first.
I work in the arts and culture sector every day and have done for my entire career and this is bad, bad policy. Not because supporting young people’s cultural lives is a poor aim – it’s probably one of the best aims we can have in this sector – but because the policy fails the first test any policy intervention should pass. It does not begin with a clearly defined problem. It begins with an instrument (the Culture Card), and works backwards from a policy instrument to try and find a problem that it “fixes”.
So, what’s the problem?
The stated rationale behind the card, such as it is, is that live attendance among young people fell after Covid and that venues face attendance challenges. OK – but that describes a symptom, it does not constitute a diagnosis. In classic neo-liberal, homo-economicus fantasy logic the government has decided that the problem must be transactional, and that if young people had the option they would “rationally” chose to sign up and consume art and culture appropriately. Its a demand side solution.
But the real question is what stops the 16-year-olds who don’t take part from taking part – and is €100 the thing standing in their way?
So here’s a bit of Nobel prize economics for you. Amartya Sen’s capability approach states that there is a gap between a resource and the real, actual freedom to use it. A €100 voucher is a commodity – an input, a resource. What we need to be thinking about is capability: whether a 16 year old has a real opportunity to convert that input/resource into the thing they (and we) actually value, a functioning cultural life. And whether they can convert it depends on what Sen calls “conversion factors” – personal, social and environmental – that vary enormously from one teenager to the next, and they vary according to social class, geography, education, inherited social capital, etc. etc
These “conversion factors” are the very barriers the scheme chooses to ignore. Geography (is there anything within reach of a teenager where they live after dark?); transport (can they get to it and home again without a car and a willing parent?); information and habit (do they know what’s on, have they anyone to go with, do they come from a household that does this sort of thing?); supply (is anything programmed for them, near them, at all?). This proposed “Culture Pass” hands every 16 year old the same resource but – again – does nothing about the wildly unequal capacity to convert it. For those already excluded, the conversion factors are missing, so the Culture Pass has no value. For the already-advantaged, the conversion factors are all in place, so the euros convert straight into more of what they were doing anyway. Equal resources; deeply unequal capabilities. And that’s not an error that’s how its designed. Its a fantasy solution in a fantasy economic model. It should be eligble for a fiction award.
Any chance of a bit of due dilligence and research?
The Culture Pass is clearly based on France’s Pass Culture, and – guess what – the French Goverenment’s own audit of this tells us that it failed in precisely the way a capability analysis would have predicted. If you make the same resource available to everybody but you don’t address the conversion factors then participation does not equalise, it diverges. The Cour des Comptes (France’s National Audit Office), reported in December 2024, that government spending on the Pass had soared, that the scheme was not meeting its social objectives, and that it needed reform. Some 84 per cent of eighteen-year-olds had signed up, but only 68 per cent of the most disadvantaged, which meant that the Pass Culture had tracked and reinforced the very inequality it was meant to close. The money went on books, driven by manga and romance; cinema and a little theatre followed; live performance came to under one per cent. The auditors’ concluded by stating that the pass tended to confirm young people’s existing habits rather than broaden their horizons – at a cost that climbed past €300 million, more than 6 per cent of the culture ministry’s budget, before France moved to cut it by half in 2025 , admitting that it needed fundamental reform.
So our proposed Culture Pass is based on a documented failure its own government is currently unwinding. As policy practice this idea goes from bad to worse.
Some more economics – policy makers should love this bit!
Lets look at the Deadweight attached to the Culture Card (Deadweight, in plain terms, is public money spent on behaviour that would have happened anyway). An awful lot of that €7.5m will subsidise the cinema and gig tickets comfortable, connected teenagers were going to buy anyway. That is not participation gained; it is spending shifted onto the State (arguably another redistribution of wealth upwards). Add to this that a €100 on a 16 year olds phone will mostly be redeemed at multiplexes and through the big ticketing platforms, not at the small regional arts centres and independent venues the scheme is rhetorically meant to help so less of that money stays in circulation. Bear in mind that the network of regional arts centres are struggling with lack of funding in the face of systemic pressures from rising costs in energy, insurance, payroll and dilapidated buildings, and a scatter of teenage transactions will not materially address that rising systemic risk.
So what will this Culture Card actually achieve?
From a policy perspective, if you wanted to design an intervention that could change the lives of excluded young people, you most certainly would not design this. But if you wanted to design something a group of people on the cusp of voting age would notice, remember and feel – a card with their name on it, €100 to spend on something fun – then this is precisely what you would design. Sadly, nobody will remember the budget line that repaired an arts centre roof or doubled a touring budget, or supported greater local collaboration between arts centres and youth arts, and youth services, or addressed any of the pressing systemic issues – but everybody remembers the free money (Trump did’t promise €5,000 for nothing). When a policy is shaped to be felt by future voters and not shaped to solve existing problems then the most economical explanation is that “political salience” (a polite phrase), not cultural outcome, is the objective. The cross-party scramble to own the idea where every party had a number but nobody had a solid diagnosis, or could identify the problem the policy was solving, just confirms this.
In fairness – maybe I’m just too cross…or am I?
On the other hand, you could argue that universalism avoids the stigma and administrative cost of means-testing. A card for everyone sends a real signal that culture belongs to everyone. Youth attendance did fall after the pandemic. Early exposure does correlate with lifelong engagement. And the French scheme, whatever its faults, enrolled most of a generation.
Unfortunately, despite the truth of all that we can’t avoid the fact that universality equalises the resource, not the capability, and that means that the money serves those with the conversion factors already in place.
Also, despite all that if we want to build a life-long habit then 16 is too late to intervene, because personal taste has already been shaped by family and the social capital inheritance, by existing capabilities, by location, class etc.
If the problem is that too many young people never form a meaningful relationship with cultural life, the money should go where that relationship is made – and if we acccept Sen’s analysis then the money should go into the conversion factors rather than the commodity.
Its also really important to say that EVERYBODY has a meaningful relationship with a cultural life, but – for whatever reasons – policy makers may prefer that people had a specific kind of cultural life, and that’s a whole different kettle of fish!