Our Letter to Minister Patrick O’Donovan

11 November 2025

Dear Minister O’Donovan,

We are pleased that you and the Department have decided to make the Basic Income for the Arts scheme permanent. We understand that it will take some time to develop and share the details for the new scheme. We wish to make a contribution to help in these deliberations.

Basic Income Ireland’s support for the scheme 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. Noting the value of this scheme and how it would be of value to so many others, we see this as an interim step towards the implementation of a Universal and Unconditional Basic Income for everyone living in Ireland.

We note the ongoing discussions about providing a basic income for carers and those coping with disability. In particular we note the issue of means-testing of benefits and the bureaucratic hurdles faced by those wishing to take up paid work to complement their benefits. This is one of the main reasons we advocate for a Basic Income.

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.

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 for people who are registered as self-employed. Furthermore, everyone is covered by our taxation system, so using the tax system is a more efficient way of using scarce government resources than adding to the bureaucratic burden on people by using traditional means-testing.

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.

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.

For your information, Dave Quinn and John Baker, of Basic Income Ireland, published a paper, ‘A Model of Basic Income for Ireland’ which outlines a specific, actionable proposal for introducing a basic income in Ireland today, and models out the impact across the exchequer and different tax groups. The key message is that ‘It’s a great idea, and we can afford this now.’

We are available for further discussion on this and look forward to hearing from you.

Yours sincerely

Bobby Lambert
Joint Coordinator, Basic Income Ireland