New Weekly Basic Income for Artists

If you are actually from Galway, you should be ashamed. Where would your city be if it wasn't for Macnas and Druid putting it on the map?

B*llocks. Medtronic, Boston Scientific…

They're not exactly synonymous with Galway, are they? If the tax incentives that keep them there dried up, you know they'd be gone. The clue is in what you posted.

Managing to get quite a few major companies

Means that they're not native to Galway if you had to "get" them in. And I can guarantee you, the arts was absolutely used in one way or another to bring them in. It always is. Whether it's a show to relax the potential investors, or some musicians over a gala dinner. The arts and culture are always used in this country to woo investors in. It's not just tax breaks, or they'd all be based in tax havens elsewhere.

Honestly, you should be ashamed of yourself. Your county (If you're from there, you didn't confirm) could be the strongest county in Ireland for arts and culture. At the moment it's far from it. Galway city doesn't even have specific rehearsal spaces available for theatre!

I'm not saying we don't have great writers. I'm saying if you ask the random population in most countries around the world which country is known for art and writers nobody will say Ireland.

I don't believe you.

And if you were talking to a person who is passionate about literature, we'd absolutely be in the top 5 countries of many and the positioning would largely down to personal preference. Joyce or Wilde tend to end up ranked alongside Tolstoy and Faulkner. We're basically top tier in terms of greatest authors of time. Contemporary we've got the likes of Sebastian Barry, Colm Toibin, John Banville, Sally Rooney, Colm McCann and Joseph O'Connor. And I'm omitting loads of names. They're all superb writers and plenty of them very much so rank in current greatest living authors.

I forgot to mention our poets, Yeats, Boland, Kavanagh and Heaney. So ya that's a pretty extensive list of literary Irish talent that the globe is very much so aware of. If you like to read anyway and I'm not talking about basic popular fiction .

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Apt username.

Not that I have skin in this fight particularly but Scotland must be comparable - Conan Doyle, Louis Stevension,Scott, Burns

Scotland punches above its weight in intellectual history (Smith, Hume, Nesbitt) so its version should be a weekly basic income for thinkers.

Conan Doyle and Stevenson are still being widely read today by the masses and will continue to be widely read by the masses probably for centuries.

I think popular fiction that lasts through the centuries is probably the most important form of literature precisely because it appeals to the masses as more people are impacted by it.Joyce and Beckett may be more stylistic important , more studied , have more critical acclaim etc but honestly how many people actually read their works, whereas everybody in the world knows Treasure Island and Sherlock Holmes.

hope this program spreads to other areas in our society, it just makes sense, it directly helps those that need it, and the businesses that ultimately receive it, hence helps towards job creation, and then of course the circulation of money via taxation, i.e. everyone wins…..

Yet look at the crowds the film fleadh, Galway arts festival, Babaro etc bring in.

It completely punches above it's weight when it comes to the arts (with the likes of Macnas and Druid) when you look at the level of funding Galway receives. As I've said before, Galway doesn't even have a dedicated rehearsal room.

There's many papers that back up the argument. People spend more if they have a regular income, this increasing the VAT receipts. All income earned above the basic income is taxable as well.