The flaws in the Basic Income for the Arts Scheme

Today I read an article by Emer McLysaght in The Irish Times: I’ve been turned down for arts funding several times. There are unwritten rules. (paywalled) I was struck by the fact that many of the observations she made were very similar to those which friends of mine in the creative industries had expressed to me, and I think a more honest distillation of the problems the scheme poses than an earlier article in the same paper, where the issue seemed to be artists snitching on each other for not doing the perceived work. To which I will respond with a resounding “Mind your own business”.

I want to declare my lack of interest up front. Not that I’m uninterested, but that I have not personally applied for this scheme on the grounds that I have a full-time job and that furthermore my problem isn’t that I don’t have time to create, it’s getting what I have already created under the nose of an interested audience. But more of that anon.

Before we get to the McLysaght article, I want to just focus in on the bloody acronym: Basic Income for the Arts -> BIA. The Irish word for food. The word people would have used in the 1840s when dying in droves and desperately hungry. We use an acronym that invokes a period of man-made scarcity! What in the Trevelyan is that about? Is it a subconscious acknowledgement that the arts world is primarily driven from top to bottom by scarcity mentality, the belief that there is not enough to go around? The belief that I must snatch your bread ration so I don’t starve? The mentality that praises “spare prose, scraped back to the bone”. Not a good start, lads.

According to my comrades and McLysaght, the main issue seems to be that you can’t get basic income from the arts council unless they’ve already given you a grant. As McLysaght notes:

The pieces of evidence are ranked in the BIA guidelines in order of suitability, and number one on the list is proof of previous funding from the Arts Council: “If you have 3 x Arts Council Bursaries or Project Awards from the last three years, proofs of these are all that you will need to upload”.

So basically in order to get money from the arts council you have to have already got money from the arts council. This is beginning to sound like the OpenAI – Nvidia drink-your-own-piss kind of scheme. And it doesn’t make sense. Why are those who already benefit from arts council remuneration be top of the heap to get even more? Surely it should be the other way around and they would be further down the list. It seems that getting a grant is more important than getting published, having one’s play produced, having one’s paintings exhibited. This is a seriously messed-up way of assessing worthiness for a basic income.

This would be bad enough if the Arts Council were not in a position of considerable power over Irish literary and artistic practice. Publishing companies and arts groups in Ireland, as well as individual creators, all have to scrabble for funding. This imposes a lack of liberty on artists to express any negative sentiment about that body. We are reluctant to say that the form we fill in to ask for a grant is what they call defensive architecture. To deliberately have some of the upload fields non-mandatory so that they can disqualify you if you fail to include them is some diabolical bullshit. And when they hired several consultancy companies to improve their grant application system, the whole thing mysteriously fell apart…I have my own ideas why.

As you can tell, I had no luck back when I was applying for bursaries and neither did McLysaght:

I applied for the Arts Council Literature Bursary last year. The criteria stipulate that the project should be at a subjectively “crucial stage”. The application process is lengthy and fiddly. I begged letters of recommendation from peers and mentors… Months later my brief rejection just read, “proposal not developed enough”. I was more crushed than I expected. The competition is fierce, so I was realistic but on rejection I was immediately frustrated at all the wasted, unpaid labour that had gone into the application…I was embarrassed at the deeply personal nature of parts of my application. All that soul-baring for nothing. 

“Proposal not developed enough” – never mind that Emer McLysaght is the co-author of one of the most wildly successful novel series in the country. Some hyper-allistic little snot decided that she was just not welcome to the ton and withheld approval for her grant. For me it was “lacks distinctive flavour”, like yeah, reduce my entire oeuvre to a fucking ice cream, why don’t you. And the feeling of baring one’s soul for nothing… a few years ago myself and a friend applied to the Evolution Programme, an Arts-Council funded initiative run by the Irish Writers Centre. We are both cancer survivors so that informed our application – but we got a long and rather scathing rejection:

Unfortunately you were not selected this time around, for one or a combination of the reasons above. We also select participants on the basis of criteria described in the call, and very importantly the dynamic of the group, inasmuch as we can anticipate at this stage. 

Excuse me, the dynamic of the what now?

You’re basically saying that you are turning down experienced writers (you have to have been published to get on this scheme) because you want a little group of people who will all get on with each other? Because of things they might have in common? Things like being young? Being white Irish? Having already had grants from the arts council? Knowing someone who makes the decisions? Whatever it is, it’s a wildly offensive reason to reject somebody’s work. Mind you, if I had gotten in, I’d have been tempted to pick my nose on a Zoom call just to play up to this “group dynamic” bullshit. But one thing I did hear repeatedly was that people felt cheated about spilling their guts about everything they had experienced, endured and emerged from, just to have a boilerplate, bullshit reply like that which made no acknowledgement whatsoever of their resilience (and, as McLysaght notes, the effort they put into the desperate pick-me dance of an application.)

This might all seem like a rant. But consider this. If this is the mentality of the people who are primarily responsible for processing and granting these applications, the selection process will continue to be impenetrable. People will continue to feel unheard and excluded. Personally I can’t trust a system that awarded ten thousand euro to the woman who took a massive dump on my debut novel in a national newspaper before eventually, inevitably, launching her own literary career – particularly when it tells me my work “lacks distinctive flavour”.

I am no friend of Minister Patrick O’Donovan, the sound of whose voice makes my teeth itch violently. But I don’t blame him for this, or his Department. This is not a “blame the government” diatribe, no, that would be too comfortable. I believe the Department’s intentions are honourable. My concern zeroes in on the Arts Council Peer Panel which supervises the grant application system. Let me tell you a story about that.

A few years ago, I received an invitation from the Arts Council to apply for their Peer Panel. This is a paid position, though I didn’t need the money and was inclined to refuse. But a friend encouraged me to apply since I could perhaps “change the system from within”. So I thought that would be a good idea and sent in my application. For months I thought no more of it. Then I got this response – “Your application is not of a sufficient standard to be included on the Peer Panel” – or very similar wording.

Not of a sufficient standard? Bitch, you invited me!

I was livid. What an absolute cheek, to invite me to apply for something, and then treat me like a piece of shit on their shoe when I took time out of my day and life to write an application at their encouragement. I mean, what in the everlasting f… Anyway, I replied to the email saying that was a completely inappropriate communication and I demanded an immediate apology. When I didn’t receive a timely reply, I went all the way up the chain of command. I kicked up a stink. Naturally I shared it on social media…and the answer was crickets. Well, not quite. I did get some support from people from various walks of life, a facilitator, a retired priest, a novelist, all who had one thing in common. They were all Black.

But from white Irish authors, crickets. Nobody wanted to speak out because of fear they might get on the Shit List and never receive any bursaries again, presumably. The race thing was really unexpected and I was quite surprised by it. I guess it’s because white women in particular tend to be establishment-adjacent, perhaps. As McLysaght grimly comments, “Writer friends will probably be horrified that I’m committing these thoughts to print in the national press, but at least I get paid for them.”

So what do we need to do to relax these crazy constraints on the Basic Income Application? Firstly, remove it from any bodies that don’t have transparency. Regrettably, the writing/arts world runs on fumes and jealousy, and there aren’t many fumes, so perhaps have someone of a different discipline to the applicant review their work? Second, scrap any reference to previous Arts Council funding, it’s a ridiculous stipulation that only encourages cliquism. Third, expand it to include more applications, to fight off the Trevelyan vibes. Fourth, proper representation of the population of Ireland on the assessing panel. (yes I know it’s random, but I’d feel more comfortable knowing there was a mix of people.)

I hope that more trust can be established, both in the bodies awarding the grant and between the recipients and non-recipients. For the former, that they have some security going forward, for the latter that they feel their work was fairly assessed and their dignity respected.