There are three certainties in life: death, taxes and filling out surveys. In days of yore, they came in paper form. They took “just a few minutes of your time” and were almost always done out of some sense of moral duty to make the collective better.
Secretly, I have always enjoyed a good survey. I’m not talking the “yes or no” types – I’m interested in multiple-choice answers, or the trusted “on a scale of one to 10” variety. My maximum attention span for these administrative curiosities is about 90 seconds. After that, I get bored, lose interest and check my WhatsApp to see if any of the 50 group chats I’m in have posted a poll about whether Sunday or Monday would suit better for a Zoom that should be an email.
As an extremely lucky, and immensely grateful, recipient of the Basic Income for Artists (BIA) grant in 2022, I accepted my place on the scheme knowing there would be a survey to be completed every six months to track my progress. The BIA was, and is, a research project to find out if giving artists €325 a week would improve their lives and creative output. Spoiler alert: it does. It was a game-changer for me, and not just monetarily. It awakened in me an awareness that my life was not what I thought it was.
Being a writer is a strange gig. Whilst people love books, TV shows and films, and some even like reading journalism and the odd trip to the theatre, writing is one of those professions that isn’t much regarded as a “real job”. So to be recognised by the State as an artist was profoundly meaningful. It gave me a sense of worth, which is no small thing.
RM Block
Humans have a tendency to attach worth to how much a person earns. And, like it or not, low-income earners (including artists) are valued less by society. In any kind of domestic partnership, a breadwinner’s time is deemed far more valuable than the partner who earns less. And when the low-earner’s time is deemed not as important, the bulk of the physical and mental load of domesticity falls to them. This mass of unpaid labour eats into their time, leading to fewer working hours, thus keeping their pay low, or seeing it drop even further. It’s a nasty, vicious circle.
The BIA participant survey taught me this reality. And it caused a giant explosion in my marriage, the shrapnel of which is still strewn about the house. But I wouldn’t change it for anything, because once you see inequity in a domestic partnership, you cannot unsee it. Not ever. And you cannot have a reckoning without first confronting the problem.
The survey was juicy. And I mean really, really juicy. The team that designed and compiled it knew what they were doing. I had expected it to include questions about my professional work and experience, queries about how I sustain my creative practice, and all the kinds of things you’d expect in a research project of this size. But the piece of this survey that hit me like a lightning bolt was the section on “time use”. In other words, how do you spend your time? And we’re not talking generally speaking, we’re talking hourly counts of the specific details that make up a person’s daily life.
Questions about “how satisfied are you with the amount of time you have spent in the past six months” on various things made me sit up and pay attention. Things such as weekly hours of household work, weekly hours of care work, weekly hours of leisure and socialising. It made my fists tighten. Am I satisfied with my time spent sleeping? “No. I’m not,” I wanted to shout at the screen. “But thank you for caring, Survey.”
When I thought it couldn’t get more deep and meaningful, the survey upped the ante and only went and asked me about my wellbeing. My wellbeing! There were questions asking if I had felt depressed or downhearted in the previous four weeks, or if I had felt anxious. But then came the big kahuna: “to what extent do you feel there has been a sense of worth, meaning or purpose associated with your artistic and creative work over the past six months?” I became undone.
Sitting in front of a screen, I watched the mathematics of my life emerge to form a story I did not ever intend to write. My value as an earner, and the hours I was clocking in on domestic and care labour, collided head on. Slowly and surely, over the years, I had become a stay-at-home mother and I was spending at least 40 hours a week as a cook, manager, personal assistant, logistics specialist, administrative executive, driver, ship captain, bosun and deck hand.
I knew this in my bones, of course, in my gut. My intuition had been screaming it at me for years, but until you meticulously quantify how the hours, days, and weeks of your life are really being spent, you can’t possibly know for sure. The BIA survey gave me that knowledge. And knowledge is power.
What started as a bureaucratic obligation blossomed into a heady mix of psychological intervention, domestic warfare and Machiavellian scheming. I went on strike, I shouted, I pouted, I cried, I printed out think pieces, evidentiary research, data, and rubbed them against my survey answers like flint on stone to burn it all down. Lord help me, I even tried a system called Fair Play, a deck of cards designed to rebalance domestic inequity. It was an epic failure.
I railed against the reality that my time, my 24 hours in a day, was worth less because I earned less, because I chose to be a writer, a “not real job”, in a sector with as much stability as a broken leg. And in all of this, it became clear to me that because my time was less valuable, I would continue to have to carry the domestic and care load. The truth was stark: my income was never going to rise. In fact, it was likely to keep dropping (this just in: middle-aged women are not in high demand with employers). There was only one option for me: change it. Change it all. I would have to drop the spinning plates, as many as I could, and let someone else, anyone, pick them up.
Fanning the flames of my rising rage was the question that asked how many hours I had spent on leisure time and socialising. In full disclosure, I have endometriosis, a chronic, incurable inflammatory disease that is incredibly painful and debilitating. Ain’t nobody with this condition clocking up big hours on the leisure and social front. And yet, I can’t help but wonder, if there had been fewer hours of domestic and care work in my life, maybe a few units of my precious energy could have been spent on having just a smidgen of fun.
The Basic Income for Artists has given me many things; far, far more than I could have ever expected. After Covid decimated the arts in Ireland, and my own career trajectory, the BIA grant gave me the opportunity to wedge open a door I thought had closed, and do the thing I love: writing. It gave me a sense of worth, it took the edge off some mighty medical bills, and it was a wake-up call for the direction my life was heading.
In Budget 2026, the Government pulled off a fantastic performance. They made it look like the BIA scheme will be retained, making them look all trailblazery in the international community, but the prestige of their magical act is not so impressive. The amount allocated is just enough to keep the artists already included on the scheme until February. That money was actually secured and allocated months ago. From February 2026, there will be no more Basic Income for Artists. Next September, applications will open again but will not be processed until the end of October, just in time for – you guessed it – Budget 2027. At this point, like a rabbit in a hat, it could all disappear. Award-winning stuff.
In the meantime, I have four more months of payments. I have four more months of counting the hours I spend writing, working outside of the arts (because, survival), of thinking about my wellbeing, and of actively trying to rebalance a household that’s been tilted for years. When I lose my BIA payments, my value and worth will drop. My “not a real job” will be under threat. And the shrapnel of domestic inequity will stick in my skin.
In my next, and final BIA survey, my answers will look different. For the first time since 2022 when I began this journey, the hours of domesticity will not outweigh the hours of creative work so heavily. This, for me, is a triumph. Through every one of the surveys I’ve completed, I’ve slowly learned to stop doing the things that have always been mine by default. And my husband has had to learn to see what I’ve quietly been carrying.
The social choreography of keeping a household and family unit functioning is exhausting. And the only reason I have been able to hold on to and rebuild a creative job is because of the BIA: €325 a week is a financial lifeline. It is a recognition of value. And crucially, it’s a source of worth for those of us who feel ‘less than’ because we chose to make the collective better through art. Long live the survey.
Lisa Tierney-Keogh is a playwright and writer; lisatierneykeogh.substack.com
