As Ireland’s $1,500-a-month basic income pilot program for creatives nears its end in February, officials have to answer a simple question: Is it worth it?
With four months to go, they say the answer is yes.
Earlier this month, Ireland’s government announced its 2026 budget, which includes “a successor to the pilot Basic Income Scheme for the Arts to begin next year” among its expenditures.
Ireland is just one of many places experimenting with guaranteed basic income programs, which provide recurring, unrestricted payments to people in a certain demographic. These programs differ from a universal basic income, which would provide payments for an entire population.
This is basically what happens in Brasil. We have a government funding program for a few decades now. The big names (ie. Friends and family) get up to a million to make their bad movies and the small folk never get approved.
I worked in the ministry of culture. We were petitioning for funding on EU programs to open libraries in small cities (50k EUR) while singers got that from the ministry for a single performance. Not to pay for the stage and lights, that was just the singer.
Every publisher has to send copies of every book to the national archive. There isn’t enough budget to catalogue or correctly store them, so they lay in gigantic warehouses gathering dust and being eaten by mites. It is so bad it is considered hazardous environment so it is super expensive to fix it.
But the famous director gets hundreds of thousands every year to make shitty movies nobody sees, because that one time 20 years ago he did something good.
To be fair, this is also how it works in Hollywood.