When Artists Can Actually Afford to Create

There’s a quiet revolution happening in Ireland, and it’s forcing us to ask a question we’ve been avoiding for decades: what if we just…paid artists to make art?

For Cork multimedia artist Elinor O’Donovan, the answer arrived as a lifeline. She was working part-time as a receptionist just to cover rent while an entire film career languished in the margins of her life—the kind of work that only gets made when someone has the luxury of time. Then Ireland launched what’s now the first permanent basic income program for artists in history. It wasn’t a temporary pilot. It worked so well they made it stick.

Here’s where it gets interesting: a €25m investment generated €100m in measurable social and economic returns. But the real story isn’t in those numbers. It’s in the work itself. With financial pressure lifted, artists are taking bigger risks, pursuing more ambitious projects, making things they never could’ve afforded to dream about before. As Arts Emergency CEO Neil Griffiths puts it,“Imagination and creation are products of time and space,”but most working artists have neither. They’re grinding away at survival jobs, their creative energy rationed to whatever hours remain after paying bills. Entire voices go quiet before anyone ever hears them.

It’s worth sitting with that for a moment. The AI boom is already eroding creative livelihoods. Arts funding across the UK is collapsing. And yet the Irish model suggests something radical: underwriting imagination isn’t charity. It’s infrastructure. It’s saying that a society that funds roads and power grids should also fund the people who make culture—because culture is how we understand ourselves.

The question now is whether other countries are paying attention. Because if they are, the conversation shifts from whether we can afford to support artists to whether we can afford not to.