Less than a month after it was revealed that Irish artists earn an average of €23k per annum, the Government’s Creative Ireland programme is to spend €140k on social media and content for its website.

The Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht has issued a tender seeking a company to provide ‘Digital Content Strategy and Content Production Services’ for the Creative Ireland programme and is offering €140k excluding VAT.

The work will involve providing text, images and video for the Creative Ireland website and running campaigns on social media, including YouTube, which has recently been engaged in an extensive campaign against artists’ interests. Last October, it was revealed that Creative Ireland spent almost €1m on newspaper, radio and social media advertising in the previous year.

Creative Ireland was launched in 2016 as the Government’s culture and creativity programme and received a 19% budget increase for 2019, bringing its funding to €7.15m.

Funding for the Arts Council, which is the main body for supporting artists and arts organisations, is still lower than it was in 2007.

In January, Theatre Forum published research which showed that 30% of Irish artists earned less than the 2018 National Minimum Wage of €9.55 per hour. This is partly because 83% were paid flat fees regardless of the number of hours worked.

For more on Theatre Forum’s research, see here. For further information on Creative Ireland, visit www.creativeireland.gov.ie.