The Blog

This one goes out to Simon, Patrick and Jack.

I have to be honest guys: I was furious. The absurd increase to the arts council is below the rate of inflation and therefore is a cut in real terms, following on from a year when it was effectively frozen (another real terms cut). These year on year cuts only mean that the infrastructure of arts centres, galleries and independent production companies – the things that are responsible for the vast majority of public engagements and most of the contracts for artists of all persuasion – will either contract, or will try to sustain their output in the face of ever rising prices and start to bankrupt themselves by spending down their reserves. Freezing (cutting) funding in a sector in which prices rise faster than the rest of the economy can only ever have one result. And then to try and hide this managed decline behind the basic income (the rollout of which has been pretty shambolic lets be honest) does not inspire confidence. Yes, giving money to people who don’t have any is a really good economic policy regardless of what the person does, but the basic income simply reduces deprivation from three times the national average to twice the national average, is already worth significantly less than it was in the first year of the pilot, and – gosh – because you’ve frozen the funding to the arts council the wider sector will be less able to provide opportunities to artists who are on BIA. And then you announce a €6m capital allocation to a sector that really needs something like €50m (at a modest guess). Oh yes, and then you promise to “consider” some tax incentives at some point in the future.

So I may have said some things in the heat of the moment, and I apologise for that, You guys are doing your best under a lot of pressure.

I assume this pressure you’re under means that you don’t get the luxury of second guessing, so I thought I might do that for you.

Since the arts council was founded the way the arts have been funded in this county has been built on single concept from a particular school of economics: the arts are a market that cannot pay for itself because there is a gap between what it costs to make a piece of art and what audiences can pay for it. For example, the majority of people can’t afford to buy a painting by a professional artist so we bundle work together into a gallery and let the public spend some time with it – if they have time, desire and capability. In other words the state fills the gap between what the art costs to make and what the public can afford to pay. This is the market failure concept, and almost everything in Irish Arts and Culture Policy flows from it : the subsidy, the grant, the annual anxiety about whether the gap has grown or shrunk. And fair enough: Baumol’s Cost Disease is real – the cost of making theatre, dance, music, literature, visual art, music goes up every day and peoples disposable income simply cannot match these rising costs – so without subsidy the whole thing collapses.

Now, guys, lets just take a time-out, a policy breather as it were, and lets look at the assumptions that sit underneath the market failure model. The moment we say that a market has failed then we must have assumed there was (or could be) a natural, self-correcting market there to begin with – one that, if left alone, would have reached an efficient price through the free rational choices of well-informed people. This is the classical economic model of markets. In that model public money is an intervention into an otherwise self-sufficient system, a necessary distortion we tolerate because culture is simply worth it.

Now that’s fine except for the fact that its not unreasonable to expect that either you or your staff really should know that several decades of economic research have demonstrated that the model of the efficient market – rational actors, each in possession of full and equal information, trading freely to maximise their utility – really describes almost nothing in the real economy we all actually live in. Herbert Simon and later Daniel Kahneman dismantled the rational actor; Joseph Stiglitz won a Nobel Prize for showing what happens once you admit that no two parties ever hold the same information (information asymmetry). And guess what? Karl Polanyi (of all people) made the point long before any of these people that the self-regulating market was never a fact of nature that politics interrupted: rather, markets are bult through law, through enclosure, through deliberate state action. “Laissez-faire,” as he put it, “was planned.” The brilliant Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang says the same thing more bluntly: there is no such thing as a free market. Every market that exists runs on rules – property, contract, licensing, standards, subsidy, tax – that we have just stopped noticing. I’m curious: have any of these names or theories every cropped up in policy conversations as you build your budget? Or are you just working on outdated assumptions and pressure from lobbyists?

Let’s repeat it – the research and the thinking in economics over many decades has made the point that a market is a designed thing, brought into being by legislation, regulation, investment and incentive. And here’s the kicker: if a market is designed, then its inequities and its failures are not accidents of nature to be patched over. They are features of the design. The poverty of professional artists, the hollowing out of our infrastructure of arts centres and production companies, the dependence on unpaid labour – these are the predictable results of a system arranged, mostly by accident rather than intent, to produce them.

Now, guys, that’s just careless. I wouldn’t want a heart surgeon to operate on me who wasn’t familiar with the research and developments in the field for the last several decades. I think its fair to expect the same of a national policy maker.

Also, by the way, the Government made a commitment to designing better public services a couple of years agao in its embrace of service design, of starting from the problem and the user rather than the existing position. If we’re honest, this is an admisssion that public systems, including markets, are designed artefacts and can therefore be redesigned.

The great economist of the common good, Mariana Mazzucato, has spent a career arguing that the State shapes markets deliberately and therefore can do it ambitiously rather than apologetically. So I don’t want to complain about the current design that you keep supporting, but I want to ask what would we build if we took that responsibility for market shaping seriously and designed an arts sector to produce quality work and to look after the people who make it?

So, here’s an approach that you can take, and you can take it now, and you can start delivering it in the course of this year (testing and prototyping) before rolling it out for the next budget. Assuming we’re all still around.

Start with the problem guys! Be clear! what problem is the policy/funding tool solving, and whose problem is it solving? A properly designed arts sector would answer each problem with a specific policy instrument. So, here we go, some spitballing for you, free of charge.

An income floor that returns value to those who create it. Yes I know you’ll point at BIA but its a clumsy and unreliable instrument and it doesn’t address the causes of poverty and precarity, However, if we agree that the arts generate enormous value – in wellbeing, in education, in tourism, in the national brand etc.- but most of the value is captured downstream from the artist, leaving the artist to absorb this as unpaid overtime and precarity, then a properly designed sector treats this as a distribution problem and fixes it directly: a reliable income floor for professional practitioners. This is located in Social Protection and designed along the lines of Farm/Fish assist programmes. Both of these programmes already accept that freelance people are free to engage in work of choice that fails to guarantee a liveable income. The mechanism is there so simply expand it. It means that the welfare challenges that artists have experienced over decades simply vanish, and the income floor is absorbed in the wider social protection budget and can’t be voted out of existence (Lets be frank, you guys made great noise about how funding for BIA was secured for this year – which is strange seeing as you had already said it was permanent).

Stable core funding for the infrastructure. This can be delivered through the Arts Council and local authorities, and it guarantees adequate and predictable funding to maintain and develop the infrastructure of the sector – the arts centres, galleries, producing organisations, the places were people actually make and show work – and to sustain a baseline of production and public engagement and real work opportunities for the artists.

A purchasing arrangement between departments. Health, education, tourism and others draw real, actual and costable benefit from cultural activity – and right now they largely take it for free, leaving the arts budget to subsidise other departments’ objectives. A properly designed system would price this honestly: where a department wishes to buy a valuable outcome, it pays for it at a proper rate. This reframes a great deal of spending from “subsidy” to procurement of value, which is both fairer and far easier to defend.

A tiered structure of tax expenditures and incentives. Private money in the arts sector right now is negligible. However, we can design a suite of tax expenditures and incentives that could give each kind of giving a deliberate route: reliefs designed for local small-business sponsorship to grow local creative economies, mechanisms for large-scale national sponsorship, and progressive reliefs for private investment and giving – designed so that lower-income households can both take part and back local and family ambitions, rather than schemes that quietly reward only those who already have the most.

Each of the ideas above is aimed at a specific problem and collectively they produce a robust system that delivers real public value, and guarantees sustainability of the wider sector. They deliver an ecology, where each piece reinforces the other rather than competing for the same shrinking pot.

Now look, none of this is simple. Costing cultural outcomes is really hard and is genuinely contested across the research. Baumol’s cost disease does not vanish because we have acknowldged it. The cost of an arts sector will continue to increase faster than other sectors – its inevitable. Taking a design approach does not make the trade-offs disappear, but it does mean that we can own them deliberately, instead of allocating a lump sum and hoping something sticks.

So, Simon, Patrick, Jack, apologies for any harsh words I may have used in response to your budget nonsense around the arts. I hope you understand now where the persistent anger comes from, and what you can actually do to deliver some real public value, Which is, after all, a part of your job.

This was a Facebook post. But someone asked for it and it took ages to find, so I’m putting it here for easy access.

A quick post about why we can’t make the Basic Income for Artists available to ALL artists/creative workers. The argument against permanance will start off with the cost problem but lets consider this for a moment. Farm Assist (and indeed Fish Assist) are statutory categories that recognise farmers and fisherfolk as self-employed people whose chosen occupation is accepted as their work despite the fact it doesn’t pay them. There is no “availability-for-work” test. The level of payment is set against income (there are of course various disregards etc.) Now the rational economic thing to do if a farmer can’t make a living is sell the farm to a larger farmer, and go off and get a job. The larger farm has economies of scale etc. so there would be no real loss to agricultural output, and very probably a rise in productivity. But we don’t do that. What the Farm and Fish assist payments establish is that a citizen has the right to chose what they work at, and has a right to be self employed without earning enough to make an effective living. Although no one would deny that the financially unrewarding work of this farmer makes a valuable net contribution to society at large.

Is that not a very similar economic situation to the average artist? And yet for some reason we get into a moral and legislative hizzy over the right of artists to pursue work as freelance workers that cannot provide an acceptable income but contributes to the wider social and economic good.

Think about it: if we added “Art Assist” as a welfare payment category then EVERY artist would be eligible. They could receive weekly payments via the Welfare Budget with no requirement to prove that they were becoming more employable, with no 3 year cliff edge, and without renouncing their freelance status.

We move from a scraps from the table “lottery” which you might win twice in a career to an entitlement that once we quality for it is paid indefinately. And you don’t have to defend a fixed budget line item every year at budget time. The welfare budget simply adjusts around the demand.

From a policy perspective we need to ask what problem are we solving? If the problem is artist poverty produced by precarity, poor funding models, and cost disease then the “Farm Assist” model is a far better policy instrument in that it is targeted, its an entitlement, and its permanent. BIA is none of these things.

Of course some changes would have to be made to the Assist framework (move to individual as opposed to household assessment for example), but making it a welfare payment on this model means that we acknowledge the right of the individual artist to choose a form of work that fails to produce a sufficient income; we acknowledge the right of that individual to be freelance and in receipt of state support; and we acknowledge the reality that some work is valuable in aggregate while failing to support at the individual level. And we stop treating people (artists) as problematic and acknowledge that the problem is systemic.”

And why is there never enough?

(and why that is not, in the end, an arts problem)

As we roll into the budget announcement I wanted to ask a question before the annual disappointment lands.

Why does the state bother to fund the arts at all?

I mean, in a very literal sense, why do we need to fund them, in the very specific, almost mechanical sense of what is the money actually paying for? What problem is it fixing?

Now, what usually happens at this point is the conversation takes a bit of a diversion and we start talking about “Intrinsic Value” “Public Good” “Merit” and in recent years “Wellbeing” “Soft Power” etc. And even sometimes we can offer “Market Failure” as the answer. Now I’ve used all of these answers and arguments in various reports, blogs, workshops, policy briefs and so on, and they are all valuable and useful from their particular perspectives.

However, if I’m completely honest I think they’re more a set of values than actual answers. (and I suspect that very few policy makers actually believe them). I say this because there is an answer to the question that is very very simple:

Performance is a great example here. Ask yourself what a ticket to a show in your local arts centre would cost if the ticket price reflected the full cost of production – the artists’ time, the building cost, the staff costs, the marketing, the set materials, the construction costs, the light, the heat, etc. All tickets would start somewhere around the €200 mark. And if it’s not Oasis nobody is willing – or able – to pay that price. The actual real price for an arts experience would literally emtpty the theatre and almost everywhere would close down.

What we call “Subsidy” is simply the name we give to the way we try to close the gap between the price people can pay and the real cost of producing the work.

When we consider the nature of that gap the whole arts economy/funding system starts to make sense, and we can understand and explain the thing that everybody complains about: why there is never, ever, enough funding. As one politician remarked to a colleage recently, “Sure you lot have a load of increases these last few years”.

Unfortunately for everybody – including this politician – the gap between affordable price and true cost is not stable, and so its not something that the arts sector might one day close through efficiency, or better “audience engagement” or marketing, or a bit of business support or an entrepreneurial mindset. The gap is being widened constantly at both ends by economic forces outside the control of the arts sector.

From one side of the gap, the price most of the public can afford to pay is falling in real terms. On a global scale wages have not tracked inflation and – as we know – housing, energy and childcare have eaten what disposable income remains for many people. The “affordable ticket price” is for an increasing number of people a smaller and smaller number every year because they have less disposable income in real terms.

And on the other side of the gap the cost of production rises inexorably – with general inflation, hypercharged by the economic phenomenon of Cost Disease.

What this means is that most artistic labour cannot get the productivity gains the rest of the economy relies on to hold prices down. It takes the same number of musicians the same length of time to play a concerto as it did a century ago; imagining the novel or the play or the poem still takes whatever time it takes, likewise the painting or the scupture or the installation. Productivity gains in this kind of labour are marginal at best. In creative labour the artist is both the principal input and the principle process. This is Baumol’s Cost Disease (Baumol & Bowen, 1966), and its impact is unavoidable:

So the gap between what the work costs and the price people can afford to pay is widening from both ends at once all the time. And that means that the subsidy required to bridge that gap gets bigger all the time. There is nothing here that the Department or the Arts Council or the sector can do to control a set of macroeconomic conditions – stagnant wages, rising prices, and rising inequality. And that is why there is never, ever enough. We keep expecting an arts budget to pay for a wealth-redistribution/inequalty/inflation problem, and that problem keeps getting bigger moment by moment, year on year.

Now we all know that the “subsidy” – when it arrives – is never, ever capable of bridging the gap between the actual cost of production and the price that can be paid, and that means that a second subsidy is required.

So, when public funding does not bridge the gap – and remember that standstill (or below the rate of inflation) funding, in a period of inflation, guarantees it will not – the shortfall does not vanish. Some things don’t happen but overall the shortfall is made up by people whose contribution never appears as a line in any budget: the artists and arts workers themselves, through fees below the minimum wage, through unpaid preparation, through deferred and foregone income, through salaries that haven’t increased in years, through increased responsibilities etc. All this free labour fills the ever-growing subsidy gap. (Interestingly the same thing happens in education, in child care, elder care, in any sector that depends primarily on people)

But we all know about the hidden subsidy – it’s a core principle in the economics of artistic labour. The arts sector is known to be an “exceptional” economy in which an oversupplied, intrinsically motivated workforce accepts systematically low and uncertain returns (see Abbing’s Why are Artists Poor, 2002 and Menger’s The Economics of Creativity 2014). Fobazi Ettarh coined the term “Vocational Awe” in 2018 (Vocational Awe and Librarianship: The Lies We Tell Ourselves) to explain the phenomenon of people who believe the work they do is so essential that that they absorb the additional costs of production into themselves. If we do that then there’s no pressing need for the state to address the subsidy gap.

We tend to think of this hidden subsidy as a characteristic of the arts labour market. But given that its a “characteristic” that is growing in size we can suggest that the poverty expereienced by artists and the fragility experienced by arts organisations are not regrettable side-effects of the funding system. They are a funding mechanism.

What I mean by this is that the hidden subsidy that generates the sectors prevailing poverty is used as the sector’s balancing item (in an accounting sense), the invisible transfer closes the funding gap and balances the books as it were. The same way it does in care, and housework, and other structurally similar sectors.

Now we have a really clear picture of the arts funding system.

On the demand side what the public can pay is falling so ticket prices cannot rise; on the supply side the cost of making the work continues to rise above the standard riate of inflation. The gap between these two poles is filled by two subsidies: the public one (e.g. an Arts Council Budget) , and the private one which is extracted from the workforce. If we continue to hold the public subsidy flat in real terms the gap widens every year. However the system still has to “clear” so it consumes the only variable left free to move – the income of the people working in the sector. It’s no surprise that the Department’s research into BIA found deprivation levels 3 times the national average.

Standstill funding is not neutral. At its heart it is a political decision about how much additional poverty the people who work in the sector will be required to absorb to keep the sector functioning.

Essentially a single under-costed subsidy is being asked to do three incompatible things at once: keep the artist alive, cover the cost of production, and keep the cost of access affordable to the public. None of these functions is resourced to meet their actual costs because they’ve become all tangled up in everybody’s mind. If we can untangle it the policy choices become clearer

Artist livelihood is an income/welfare question and should sit with social protection and a payment scheme open to all creative workers modelled on something like the farm assist scheme should be put in place.

Production is a supply-side question and funding needs to meet the true cost of making the work, so the output costs need to be priced realistically (if you funded everything 100% then the state could earn all the PAYE, VAT etc, and could take some or all of the value of sales back)

Access is a demand-side question and the cost of access needs to be minimised, and Sen’s capability approach needs to be taken so we can identify real barriers to access and deal with them.

If we fund each function then we can stop balancing the books by extracting more free labour from the people who work in the sector.

Will this require a bigger subsidy? Absolutely! It’s worth saying that the idea that a state subsidy is a cost to be minimised, especially on “non essential services”, is an ideological position. As Mazzucato (2018) and many, many others have argued: state subsidy creates value in its own right (the Department’s own reseach on BIA clearly established this)

So, when the budget drops and news of arts council funding is announced, remember two questions that matter.

Which of the three jobs is this money pretending to do?

And: whose poverty is making up the difference?

We can ask the same questions about a whole range of human centred sectors dependent on subsidy and held together by invisible labour (and its worth doing that)

From a policy perspective putting more money into a poorly designed system does not fix anything, it just slows down the collabpse. The problem was never the money, it was always the design.

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!

I’ve been reading Cory Doctorow’s Enshittification, his book on the appalling behaviour of the Big Tech companies and I got to thinking about arts centres and arts marketing in general. I’d love to know if the implications of what he’s suggesting are real so here it is.

Facebook (and Tik Tok and insta etc) and Google changed the way they work so that they could maximise the money they could extract from advertisers and users. As a result there are no longer any guarantees that an ad you pay for is even shown to its intended market and no guarantee that the content you post is seen by your followers or interested people. The algorithm on the feed means that the people following you see less and less of your posts.

Facebook organic page reach dropped from around 6–8% to 2–3% after the 2018 News Feed change, and the 2020–2023 shift to algorithmic Instagram feeds cut organic reach for non-Reel content by 50%+. Also, paid social has got dearer: average cost per click across Facebook and Instagram rose roughly 89% between 2019 and 2024.

In other words, if you’re relying on social media and online ads to sell tickets you’re more than likely just burning money.

Yes, but what about all those engagement metrics and charts we can get from our social media platforms?

Doctorow argues convincingly that platform analytics are designed to make spending feel effective and to keep it flowing. Impressions, reach, engagement rate are all designed to measure the platform’s activity, not the outcome. Sure, your post may well have reached 12,000 people but how many of them bought a ticket? This “conversion rate” is the only valuable metric – everything else is vanity. If you don’t have a way to track that engagement to your box office software then it’s not really telling you anything. It’s just noise masquerading as insight.

Interestingly, email conversion rates at 1–5% are roughly 10 times organic social conversion rates which tend to be 0.1–0.5 and email has a higher return on investment.

If Doctorow is correct then the principle purpose of your social media content strategy is simply to be there if someone goes looking for it, it’s a coms channel, just don’t expect it to sell any tickets, don’t expect posts to be shown to your followers, don’t expect ads to reach their target audience.

About 15 years ago I ran a €50 Facebook add campaign and sold out an underperforming venue in two days on a tour. It feels like those days are over.

Love to hear people’s experiences around this.

Just spent a couple of days at the Performing Arts Forum in Belfast. A really interesting, provocative, entertaining and fun couple of days (everything the performing arts are if you think about it) – so congratulations to the team at PAF, to the curators Ruth McGowan and Alice Malseed, the panellists, the moderators, the contributors and the wonderful performers.

A high point for me was the Long Table session facilitated by Dr. Ali FitzGibbon of Queens University. The Long Table approach was new to me, and – if you haven’t experienced it in action – check it out!

The session was designed to explore where the performing arts sector is at, six years on from the COVID pandemic. “What were the positive changes that emerged? What challenges are still with us? What is the learning with hindsight from such a critical time for performing arts?”

The contributions were honest, emotional, rigorous and various. There was one thing that captured my attention. The number of times people said that they felt “visible” during the pandemic. It felt like suddenly everybody was talking about artists, money seemed to increase into the sector, opportunities opened, people had access to space and resources they hadn’t had before. For a brief period they were “seen”. But that visibility seemed to evaporate once everything “got back to normal”.

I was surprised by the depth of emotion around this experience. And as I reflected on the previous days panel discussions and listened to the second day’s discussions I kept hearing the experience of being invisible in almost every discussion. If an experience is that pervasive then it must be systemic in some way and that’s when the the very obvious penny dropped with a very very loud clatter.

Pick up the Arts Act (any version of it), or pick up the National Cultural Policy, or any creative industries plan, or pick up a Local Area Development Plan, or Tourism Plan or any of these kinds of documents and you will find endless mentions of The Arts (and/or Creativity) , and marvellous claims for the impact and social and economic values of “The Arts” but you will not find – from the Arts Act down – any systematic mention or consideration of the labour force required to create “The Arts” – not just the artists but the managers, the administrators, the technicians, nobody gets a mention. You could be forgiven for thinking that “The Arts” arrive as if by magic.

If the people who make and sustain the “The Arts” are invisible within the framework of National Policy – from the founding legislation down – then “The Arts” can be seen as “naturally occurring”. Any “naturally occurring” phenomenon of value (land, water, air, oil, minerals, care) will be exploited. If a labour force is essentially invisible in policy and legislation then it has neither rights nor price.

That invisibility allows politicians and policy mandarins to talk about a sector that generates billions of euro in economic value without really concerning themselves with the economic welfare of the people who make and maintain that value.

It is this very invisibility that allows policy to talk about “subsidy” and not “investment”, that allows for subsidy to ignore inflation, that thinks that the welfare of the labour force is best served by a non index linked lottery scheme, that struggles to understand low income/poverty/precarity as anything other than a personal failing/responsibility. It is this invisibility that allows funding to be treated as a tenner slipped into your hand by a relative at a birthday; it is this invisibility that sparks angry outbursts from politicians who fundamentally are outraged that you’re not grateful for the tenner.

Travelling back in the train I thought that if there was one necessary action to emerge then it is to return the labour force to the legislation, and don’t do it as an afterthought, tucked into a welfare clause, but as the founding premise. Name the workers – not as beneficiaries of “subsidy”, as grateful recipients of the tenner – but as the people without whom there is no arts sector to speak of, fund, or take credit for.

Once that is done then any policy that does not have a labour force plan, a plan that is fully costed and funded, a plan that acknowledges worker rights alongside cultural rights and values, that treats precarity and poverty as a design failure and not a personal one, that indexes support to the real cost of a working life in the arts will be recognised for what it is: not an arts (or cultural policy) but a property policy. Something designed to manage and exploit a “naturally occurring resource”; a policy that does not see people. A policy not worthy of consideration.

That’s the work.

The Basic Income for Artists has already proved its value according to all government reports. More importantly it’s stopped behaving like a “pilot scheme” and started behaving like essential infrastructure.

People have planned their lives around it. They’ve worked more, not less, taken risks they couldn’t take before, some people have even secured mortgages!

For many of the 2000 people about to come off the scheme in the next week or so all of these developments are in danger and that truly is a tragedy of planning.

According to this government the Basic Income kicks off again in September 2026. But do we just rinse and repeat, or do we take the opportunity to plan for permanence? Are we are willing to finish the job?

What if the next challenge was resolving the design flaws: The Basic Income looks like a grant, is treated like income, and is governed as an exception.

This confusion is the main weakness of the scheme. Coupled with that, because it sits outside the social protection system:
• it interacts badly with welfare supports,
• it creates uncertainty around illness, housing, and life events,
• and it remains politically fragile, vulnerable to reframing as discretionary spending, and dependent on arbitrary political will.

What if the big challenge is understanding that this is a Basic Income Policy, not an Arts Policy. In truth, none of this is about the arts and we need to stop talking about it in the exceptional language of arts policy. Basic Income is about where income supports belong.

Surely, if something provides income security, it belongs in the income security system.

“Grants” fund activity. Income supports secure people. BIA is built on a grant logic trying to solve income problems, the state makes this mistake quite a bit and it never quite works.

Now, the pilot has shown, quietly but decisively, that artistic labour doesn’t fail because of a lack of talent or ambition. It fails because of income volatility. Therefore, if we can reduce the volatility, the rest of the system starts working again.

That underlines the previous point:
Basic Income isn’t an arts intervention. It’s a labour intervention. And that’s worth memorising.

The inevitable next step in this logic: put it where income lives, inside the system that already knows how to do this job.

The social protection system is already set up to:
• support people who work intermittently,
• allow earnings alongside payments,
• manage volatility through taxation and annual assessment,
• and provide continuity across illness, care, and ageing.

Arguably the Back to Work Enterprise Allowance is an early version of the Basic Income Scheme.

Keeping the Basic Income outside that system is no longer neutral. It actively undermines the scheme (as all the people who discovered they were losing their disability benefits will tell you)

Integration isn’t radical. It’s administrative common sense.

It’s important to remember that the welfare system already allows people to work, earn, and receive income supports at the same time. (What it doesn’t handle well is pretending income is a grant).

Once earnings are treated normally – taxed annually, assessed over time rather than week-by-week – the problems disappear. People work more when the cliff edges are removed. We already know this.

There’s a real temptation to think of the next phase as a fight: more funding, more cohorts, more advocacy. But the real task is far more tedious.

What if the next stage of BIA is:
• turning the pilot into a statutory payment, protected by legislation
• moving from discretion to legal entitlement,
• shifting from being exceptional to being protected in a larger system.

If we accept that the Basic Income belongs in social protection, something else becomes clear: artists are not a special case. They are just an early one.

Artists labour reveal what happens when work is intermittent, value is long-term, and income doesn’t arrive neatly every Friday. And that’s no longer unusual. It’s increasingly normal.

The Basic Income doesn’t need defending as an arts policy. It needs finishing as a labour and welfare policy. All it needs is some political will, and a few legislative tweaks and we can have the system the international press currently and mistakenly thinks we have.

And finishing it means putting it where it was always heading anyway..

And just for the record even 8000 artists (four times the current cohort) would account for approximately only 0.48% of the 2026 Department of Social Protection budget. Less than half of one percent. Mull that over for a second.