1960s Timeline +
The origins of tax exemption for artists
1960
The notorious ignorance and obtuseness of our Treasury clerks is one obvious reason while another may be that members of our Cabinet are not educated persons, and who know nothing or care nothing about books and the people who write them.
Brian O’Nolan – letter to the Secretary of the Arts Council, 5 January 1964.
In the 1960s, the Arts Council was active in campaigning for tax relief for the arts. Aspects of income tax were reputed to ‘affect adversely the practice of the arts in Ireland’. In November 1960, the Arts Council made representations to the Commission on Income Tax urging the desirability of:
- a rebate of income tax on artistic donations, including those in the field of architecture.
- spreading over a period of five to ten years the income tax chargeable on large individual sums earned in respect of literary or other artistic work in one financial year.
The Secretary of the Arts Council, Mervyn Wall, brought to the ‘Commission’s notice the case of the writer or artist who may for many years earn relatively little by the practice of his art. He has however during all those financially lean years been practising and improving himself at his craft. He then has a sudden success and earns in one financial year a very large sum of money, but has to surrender the greater part of it in sur-tax and supertax. The success may never be repeated in subsequent years, and indeed he may be so discouraged and embittered that he never may wish to see it repeated, as almost the only one to gain by his labours would have been the Revenue Commissioners.’
In 1964, representations were made to the Department of Finance on the matter of reciprocal arrangements between Ireland and a number of European countries so that citizens of those countries should no longer be required to pay double income tax in relation to literary earnings.
In 1967, collaboration between Constantine Fitzgibbon, Garret Fitzgerald and Mervyn Wall around the issue of taxation of artists in Ireland led to a more ambitious proposal whereby:
- artists’ earnings from countries other than that in which they resided, should be tax free;
- all of an artists’ earnings from artistic sources should be tax free.
This eventually became a reality when in May 1969 the Minister for Finance, Charles Haughey, TD, announced in the Dáil:
to help create a sympathetic environment here in which the arts can flourish, I will provide in the Finance Bill that painters, sculptors, writers and composers living and working in Ireland will be free of tax on all earnings derived from work of cultural merits.
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'I don't think Picasso is going to move up here' says Mr Wall, however. 'An elderly man isn't going to move to a damp climate.'