Ms Emily O'Reilly:

At the beginning of the crisis when countries started seeing cases and knew there were very bad things for their people coming down the track, there was a panic. Certain countries refused to export their personal protective equipment, PPE, to hoard it and all of that. Certain countries, particularly the bigger ones, wanted to go their own way on that, which obviously was going disadvantage other countries which did not have the same capacity or resources. It was the Commission and other leaders that persuaded the member states to take a different approach and to try to take a joint approach, if possible. That led to a fairer distribution of PPE and other health resources.

On the joint vaccination procurement, it was done with the same intention that it would not be the states who could afford it that were going to buy everything up and that we would jointly agree this. That is what happened; it was jointly agreed. People see the Commission, Madame von der Leyen and so on, but sitting around the table with Madame von der Leyen are the Irish representatives as well as the Spanish representatives, the Polish representatives and everybody else. It could be argued the Commission is doing the work, has the information and is ultimately more influential than an individual member state, but the fact is the member states were all involved.

On the Senator's question of how to avoid this in the future, the member states have to learn the lessons of this. Do member states want more Europe and a more centralised European response, which would be significantly better than what we have seen, or do we want a go-it-alone strategy, which will inevitably disadvantage smaller countries, including our own? Those are big political decisions but people need forensically to analyse what went on, to be honest with the public about where responsibility lay and to put forward proposals which would avoid this happening so the next time one person, and it always starts with one person, in, say, Ireland emerges with a potentially lethal virus, the wargaming has been done and there is a united approach to it.