The Stage on-line makes note of a possible change in Irish tax policy sure to affect at least some creative individuals. The government is set to review an exemption of income tax on writers, artists, and musicians in the Irish Republic.
The exemption, designed originally to provide another form of subsidy to creative artists, had also become a massive incentive for affluent creative individuals to make their home in Ireland. Now the government is feeling pressure to rethink that incentive, especially as it relates to the rich folk.
It’s an interesting example of the challenges of carrots and sticks, or the various policies governments use to reshape their cultural landscape (intentionally, or more often by accident). Through income tax incentives, zoning, specialized tax credits (for preservation of historic buildings, for example), grants, awards, marketing, and communications, governments can encourage certain choices over others. In the aggregate, these redirected choices of individuals slowly accumulate into a new shape and face to a community, a city, or a country.
One of the more bizarre elements of Ireland’s tax exemption is the burden it places on the government revenue bureaucracy. Since the legislation provides an exemption to artistic work that is ‘original and creative’ in one of five creative forms (see the on-line description of the exemption here), it’s up to the Revenue office to determine what ‘original and creative’ means — a task that would give even an aesthetics professor a conniption.
To resolve this, the legislation defines truth and beauty in creative expression, at least for the Irish universe:
A work has cultural merit if its contemplation enhances the quality of individual or social life by virtue of that work’s intellectual, spiritual or asethetic form and content.A work has artistic merit when its combined form and content enhances or intensifies the asethetic apprehension of those who experience or contemplate it.
It will be interesting to watch the debate over this particular tax incentive (okay, interesting for me, anyway), as the public wonders out loud about the relative value of having artists live in Ireland rather than somewhere else (even hyper-affluent immigrant artists). But in the meantime, it’s wonderful to know that the definitions of ‘cultural merit’ and ‘artistic merit’ have been resolved by the Irish Revenue department.
All you humanities and philosophy professors can go home, your work is done.
