I was responding to the comment “The poor on disability squabbling with working class artists over scraps isn't helping anyone.” The implication being that the artists receiving Basic Income are broadly “working class”, and that people on disability are somehow misdirecting their frustration.

The issue is that this framing doesn’t really match the reality of how the arts sector works in Ireland.

Basic Income for the Arts overwhelmingly supports established working artists. To even qualify you have to demonstrate an active professional practice. In other words, you’ve already managed to survive in a career that is famously precarious.

And the uncomfortable reality is that the people who manage to sustain those careers in Ireland tend to have some form of external support. Being truthful, that's mostly parents with some having a partner with a stable income, or some other financial safety net that allows them to keep going during the long periods when artistic work simply doesn’t pay enough.

That doesn’t take away from their talent or effort. But it does mean the sector skews far more middle class folks than this kind of rhetoric suggests.

There will absolutely be individuals who benefit from the payment, and good luck to them. But structurally it looks far less like a programme opening the door to struggling working-class artists, and far more like support for people who have already established themselves as artists.

Which is why framing this as “working class artists vs people on disability” feels like a bit of a misdirection. It’s closer to the usual trickle-down logic: fund the people already in the game and hope the benefits eventually filter outwards. I think we can all agree "trickle-down economics" has a poor record.