Cash for reforms: €700 billion EU recovery fund sparks concern and criticism

IRELAND IS ONE of a number of EU countries who have repackaged old promises as part of its pledged Covid recovery reforms, a new analysis has found.

Dr Diarmuid Torney, co-director of DCU’s Centre for Climate and Society, said that this milestone was “an easy win” for the government as it was already a “long-standing commitment” with cross-party consensus. He added: European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on a visit to Ireland in July 2021 to discuss Ireland's Recovery and Resilience Plan

This arrangement was agreed at a five-day EU summit in Brussels in July 2020. Since then, the greater part of the Recovery and Resilience Fund has still to be disbursed, with the programme running until the end of 2026. “On 13 January 2023 following extensive engagement, the Commission adopted the Operational Arrangements for Ireland’s Recovery and Resilience Plan.”

But CureVac was unable to deliver. Following disappointing results regarding the vaccine’s effectiveness, the German company announced in October 2021 that it had decided to withdraw its vaccine candidacy from the approval process. In the end, Germany invested €121 million less than intended. As it had not achieved all of its goals, the Commission could reduce the German payment by an amount determined at its own discretion.

A team of international journalists led by Follow the Money and including Noteworthy as an Irish parter are collaborating under the banner of the #RecoveryFiles. We have investigated some of the promised reforms made by their member states and how they have been implemented so far. Old reforms repackaged One discovery made during the investigation was that at least seven member states, including Ireland, had included measures in their plans which were actually not new at all.

An even higher proportion were fulfilled by Germany who had completed 23 out of 37 initial milestones and targets before plan approval. In other words, more than half of Germany’s promises for the first tranche required no effort. The Netherlands proposed to achieve 26 milestones before it would request its first instalment. Of these, 13 had already been completed by 8 July 2022, the day the Netherlands submitted its plan to Brussels. One such milestone was the coming into force of a revised Open Government Act – something which had already happened on 1 May 2022.

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