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 by noteworthy_ie & European journalists has found This investigation is part of RecoveryFiles project with ftm_eu:
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.
The Commission’s proposed legal text setting the detailed rules for the fund spoke of “the subsequent four years”. A previously confidential document written in the same week as the summit has shown that diplomats from France, Cyprus, Latvia, Hungary and Malta were lobbying in favour of including old reforms and investments.
Sweden and Austria were the only countries mentioned in the document as opposing it, although a spokesperson for the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that the Netherlands also “actively advocated” for not using the RRF to finance “existing measures”. Another, the Schools Broadband Programme, has been ongoing in various iterations for more than a decade. It is currently funded and managed by the Department of Education at an annual cost of €13 million.
The same RRF project on digital infrastructure in schools also had one of Ireland’s simplest milestones to achieve – publication of a circular to schools. This circular which detailed a grant scheme was sent to schools by the Department in November 2021. Lena Wurm / Alamy Stock Photo Transposing European directives is not optional Lena Wurm / Alamy Stock Photo / Alamy Stock Photo
Italy promised that none of its inhabitants would be living “in agglomerations non-compliant” with the directive by the end of March 2026, while Spain promised to introduce measures “aiming at ensuring compliance” with the EU rules by mid-2023. Politicians from ‘frugal’ countries may say that the Commission is rewarding member states with money from an EU fund for measures they are legally obliged to take anyway – and which other member states have paid for out of their own national budgets.
Although the Commission has emphasised in a strategy paper published in October 2022 that the Recovery and Resilience Facility “is not an enforcement tool”, the system of milestones does give the Commission an additional device to make member states comply with EU laws. In countries like Italy, you can also see that the system of milestones has stabilised long-term transformations. In November 2022, the Commission disbursed €21 billion to Italy after it completed 45 milestones and targets. One of them was a new law which made companies accept electronic payments as a way of reducing tax evasion.
Changes to rule of law Most of the attention will probably go to how the Commission is going to react to payment requests from Poland and Hungary, which first need to resolve core rule of law issues before they can receive any RRF money. In August 2022, four groups of European judges filed a lawsuit before the Court of Justice to reverse the member states’ approval of the Polish recovery and resilience plan.
The draft Romanian law implementing those rules has been heavily criticised by the European Public Prosecutor’s Office , which feared that the law offered so little protection, it would actually discourage potential whistleblowers in Romania. Although the text was amended before it became law, concerns remain.
In a press release from last April, the government stated that a reduction in VAT on gas and electricity would “more than offset the increase in carbon tax”. The RRF regulation states that there should be “satisfactory fulfilment” of the milestones and targets, leaving a margin of discretion for the Commission.
The draft legislation setting up the fund proposed that member states would be required to submit national plans to Brussels, in which they would promise milestones and targets. The reimbursement of money from the fund would then be conditional on the fulfilment of those milestones and targets – exactly the way it works with the RRF.
Holding off on payment requests Alamy Stock Photo Then Taoiseach Micheál Martin leaving a meeting at the EU summit shortly after the RRF plan was agreed Alamy Stock Photo A target in Ireland’s plan involving a large number of people is the enrollment of at least 430,000 patients – just over 8% of the entire population – “with chronic disease or high risk of chronic disease” in a component of the Chronic Disease Management Programme by the end of this year.
The auditors urged the Commission to establish a method to calculate how to reduce payments in the case of failed milestones, so that each member state is treated equally. The first step is an informal cooperation process between the Commission and Ireland. Upon completion of this informal process, Ireland will present a formal payment request to the Commission. The Commission then checks for “the satisfactory fulfilment of Ireland’s milestones and targets”. Following this, the payment request “is considered by Council after which the Commission processes the payment”, the spokesperson added.
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