There is obviously a sense of relief that the tax exemption for artists has again been left untouched by the Minister for Finance in Budget 2004. But the Socialist Party TD, Mr Joe Higgins, has a point when he calls for the tax break to be removed from "music industry millionaires".
Any opportunity to amend the scheme should also be used to extend it to interpretive artists - an issue that has never properly been resolved.
When the idea of introducing a tax-free status for writers and artists was introduced by Mr Charles Haughey in 1969 it was highly praised at home and abroad as an imaginative and enlightened expression of concern for the well being of the individual artist.
Haughey himself said of the gesture that it "was meant to be a statement by the establishment that we valued the creative people in our society".
In the early days of its implementation, the initial impact seemed to be to attract a number of foreign writers who welcomed the opportunity of a tax haven. In some instances the literary merit of the work of some of these writers was indeed questionable. The subsequent establishment of Aosdanna in 1981 - Haughey's other major contribution to cultural policy - was probably a more tangible and advantageous benefit to the lives of Irish artists, or at least a limited coterie of them.
Quite clearly, serious anomalies have arisen in the years since the tax exemption scheme was initiated. In the late 1960s, there were few, if any, high earners among the ranks of our literary and artistic clan - whether they were novelists, playwrights, composers or painters. That, of course, has changed with the upsurge in the number of international superstars and best-selling authors that the State has produced in the meantime.
There are obviously great disparities in the earning-power - and the lifestyle that that provides - between, for example, some in the music business who have had enormous financial gain from their work and the visual artist who might struggle to stage an occasional exhibition and then have to spread the income from that exhibition over a couple of years.
The tax-free scheme has not been without its difficulties and controversies either. The issue of what is and what is not creative writing, and therefore eligible for this absolution, has on several occasions been tested in the courts.
The way to bring some balance into the scheme would be to cap the level at which earnings are tax-free but to ensure that those like "poor Paddy Kavanagh", referred to by Mr Higgins, continue to benefit from it.