Ms Emily O'Reilly:

The links between the EU and Ireland are incredibly important and they have always been very good. We saw that during the Brexit negotiations. It was interesting to note last week when there was some talk of the EU adopting a more protectionist attitude in regard to the export of vaccines and so on that Ireland was to the fore in warning against that because there have been some short-term benefits.

Ireland was fairly quick to see the medium-term and long-term difficulties that might pose. As well as this, since the UK left the EU, although Ireland and the UK would have always partnered and been allies on many issues of mutual importance in the EU, there is the issue of new alliances emerging. Ireland is part of that. Before the Covid-19 pandemic, there was a sense that Ireland was cleaving more towards some of the Nordic countries, such as Denmark, and the Netherlands and so on. It will be a while, however, before those alliances form themselves in a stronger way.

I cannot stress enough the importance of engagement in Dublin, the capital, with Government and the Oireachtas in the room members are in now. People think the EU happens in Brussels. It does not; it happens in all the member states. Committees such as this and other relevant committees have a huge role to play in bridging that gap between the two settings. I know that sounds almost like a cliché but I really cannot emphasise it enough. The messaging from the EU needs to happen in the member states.

The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, ECDC, was where the EU came up against its own internal contradictions, in a sense, in that it was an EU solution to an EU problem. On one hand, the member states did not want to concede any of their competence with regard to health. The ECDC, therefore, was given few powers and little independence of action. Therefore, although it was given a title that mimicked that of the centre in the US and other places, it certainly did not have the capacity to do what it was intended to do. The pandemic certainly exposed that.

The issue now is for the EU if it wants to have a powerful agency in future pandemics, or even in the current one, which does not seem to be going away any time soon. If it really and truly wants an agency with power and with the capacity to co-ordinate all the responses from the members states, then it must have a big discussion and debate with the member states to see whether more power should be ceded to it. It is a sort of sleight of hand. When most citizens hear of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, they think that is exactly what it does. It actually does not, however. In a way, it is a sort of post box for information that may or may not come, or may not come at the right time, for member states, which it puts together and sends it out, usually belatedly.

I will finish on this. Quite early on in the pandemic, in January and February when the first cases started emerging in European countries, particularly France, Germany and Italy, the ECDC suddenly almost had an existential crisis. Its instinct was to say that everything will be fine and we can cope with this. Within a few weeks it was forced to say that it could not. The EU, and member states in particular, had to learn from that and really ask what they wanted. Did they want to hold on tightly to their powers with regard to health policy or cede them for the greater good?