13/10/2026
Public Statement by Equity on the Impact of Budget 2027 on the wider arts sector.
The wider arts sector Budget allocations for 2027 represent a failure of understanding and a failure of intent. The appalling decisions regarding the back-pedalling on Arts Council funding and the previously agreed funding for RTE, are the clearest indication yet that the relationship between the arts and the State has run its course and needs to be rebuilt from the ground up.
Despite assurances from the Minister that “things would look very different for the Arts Council” the Government has presented a below-inflation standstill as "record funding." An increase of 2.5% against forecast inflation of 3% is not support - it is yet another cut presented as generosity. As any government official with even the most elementary understanding of economics knows, flat funding in a sector whose costs rise every year is not a neutral decision - it is disinvestment by design and anyone who grasped how a theatre, a gallery, an arts centre or a touring company actually keeps its doors open would know that. Beneath that decision lies the deeper ideological error that underpins this government’s decision: the belief that money spent on the arts is a cost to be contained rather than an investment that returns. That single flawed assumption is the root of everything wrong with this budget.
At the 2024 hustings, every party in this Government committed to protecting and increasing arts funding. Those commitments have been quietly abandoned inside eighteen months. The Department, however, found the ambition for sport that it could not find for culture, and a State that puts Irish artists at the centre of its European Presidency and trades on our culture in every room it wants to look serious in has decided, at home, to let the thing it boasts about abroad be hollowed out by ignorance and indifference. That is not fiscal prudence. It is an ideological choice, and it should be named as one.
That choice leads to additional hardship in a sector that already experiences deprivation at 3 times the national average (according to the Department of Culture, Communication and Sport’s own research) and it will lead to a collapse. Organisations throughout the arts sector are now spending down reserves that were meant to protect them. If the government chooses to continue on the present path then what we are witnessing is the managed decline of an entire national sector. An indifference to ideas, public debate, reflection that is accidentally authoritarian. The “accidental” underfunding of RTE speaks to both the ineptitude of this government and its disdain for the public realm. These decisions will mainly have an impact on workers within the sector as the cuts would no doubt trickle down to those who can least afford to be affected.
This is not an affordability issue, the State is not a corner shop balancing its till at close of business, and it is long past time the government grew up and stopped playing shop. A government that understands its own accounts knows that investment and consumption are not the same word, and that a country running sustained surpluses and establishing “rainy day” (sovereign wealth) funds is not constrained, it is making choices.
The arts are among the best places in an economy to invest a marginal euro. It is a labour-intensive sector with the work done here, by people who spend here; the money stays in the domestic economy instead of leaking abroad. You could not design a more efficient thing to fund.
The government must immediately acknowledge that it has made a mistake - it must adhere to the funding agreement with RTE and it must meet the Arts Council’s request for €160 million. Failure to do this can only mean that the state is content to oversee the decline of the public realm, and quite content for people experiencing three times the level of deprivation to pick up even more slack to keep Brand Ireland on the road.
But more than that it is high time that the this annual practice of praise and humiliation is replaced by a grown up approach to the arts sector that includes:
• A permanent, indexed, statutory artist income housed in the department of Social Protection to replace this discretionary, non index linked stipend that barely supports 2000 people and can be revoked at any budget cycle.
• Enforce existing rights for artists, in particular copyright protections in the audio-visual sector. Public money cannot be allowed to flow to organisations in breach of existing national and EU legislation. Show some respect.
• A multi-year, index-linked settlement for the organisations across the country that artists of all practice depend on because funding artists while starving the places they work in is incoherent, The arts council’s annual submission is an account of what the sector needs to continue based on their own costings. It is time to acknowledge the reality of those costing and respond accordingly
• Reform of the tax treatment of cultural production and investment, including on sponsorship and philanthropy focused on local development so that private capital can be drawn in alongside public money rather than shut out of it.
This budget is a clear indication that the Government must be called to account and must respond in an adult and respectful fashion. If the arts sector is to thrive, if it is to continue to be a source of national pride, soft power, and endless photo opps then we need to move forward in genuine partnership, and not in this chaotic, random, and poorly judged dispersal of scraps. The ongoing managed decline of our national culture needs to stop now.
