In a letter to the editor of the Irish Times (2 October 2025), BII Joint Coordinator John Baker endorses Basic Income for the Arts as a step towards Universal Basic Income.

Sir, – Earlier this year, your editorial called for the retention and extension of Basic Income for the Arts (BIA).

The case is strengthened by the latest report on the pilot scheme, published last week. This cost benefit analysis showed that “for every €1 of public money invested in the pilot, society received €1.39 in return”.

It follows four other reports that detailed the hugely positive impact of BIA payments on the lives of recipients and their families.

As your editorial pointed out, retention and extension of the BIA was endorsed by all parties in the general election and by Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil in particular. But how it will be retained and extended in the budget, if at all, is still unclear.

Basic Income Ireland’s interest in the BIA pilot has always been primarily as a step towards the implementation of a universal basic income for everyone living in Ireland.

As such, our support for BIA has been based on the situation of arts workers as precarious workers with low, irregular and insecure incomes, who nevertheless do very valuable work that benefits Ireland both economically and culturally.

The research reports demonstrate the depth and extent of that precarity and insecurity.

We therefore endorse the retention of BIA and its extension to all arts workers, by continuing to support the initial cohort of recipients, while extending the payment to a much larger group. We also call for the BIA to be a permanent payment that goes to all arts workers throughout their careers.

In any basic income scheme, a common question is why income support should be provided to people on higher incomes.

Throughout the global basic income movement, the answer has always had two complementary responses. The first is that the personal situations of individuals are always liable to change.

They may have good incomes now, but they may face periods of low income during which they need income support, due to loss of employment, personal crises, illness, care responsibilities, and so on.

The second response is that a properly constructed basic income scheme ensures that high-income individuals always pay more in tax than they receive in basic income.

In other words, the basic income payment is targeted at the people who need it most by means of taxation, rather than traditional means-testing.

In effect, the extra tax paid by high-income recipients recoups the value of basic income from these individuals and contributes to the payments received by others.

The case for targeting through taxation rather than means-testing is particularly strong in relation to people with insecure incomes, such as most arts workers.

Means-testing relies on past incomes, which for such workers are not a guide to current incomes.

By contrast, tax reflects the incomes that people actually receive concurrently with their basic incomes. It is collected either on an ongoing basis, for people in the PAYE system, or annually in arrears f or people who are registered as self-employed.

It would therefore be completely consistent with the point of BIA for it to be accompanied by a surtax on the incomes of its higher income recipients. Such a charge would both target the payment to those who need it most and reduce the net fiscal cost of the BIA. – Yours, etc,

JOHN BAKER,

Joint Co-ordinator,

Basic Income Ireland,

c/o Comhlámh,

Dublin 2.