Pandemic supports must continue after coronavirus crisis eases, Paschal Donohoe insists

Economic supports to business owners and workers must continue even after the Covid-19 pandemic abates, Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe has said.

Mr Donohoe said little over a year ago nobody in the EU would have imagined a crisis like the Covid-19 pandemic. But equally they could not have imagined the co-ordinated economic response of the entire European Union and especially the European Central Bank.

The Finance Minister said the incomes of 21.5 million employees and 5 million self-employed people in 18 EU countries had been safeguarded over the past year of the pandemic – amounting to a quarter of all workers.

“These are not abstract big numbers. These are real people, real workers and real businesses,” Mr Donohoe said.

The Finance Minister said he expected a reopening of economies across the European Union in the coming months, resulting in a boom in domestic spending, in part fuelled by huge domestic savings due to the virus.

But he said national governments and the EU must ensure that this boom is sustained by continued supports and corrective measures. He said the 19 nations that use the EU single currency, the euro, are committed to such policies later this year and into 2022.

“In simple terms we have reaffirmed that there will be no sudden withdrawal of budgetary supports,” Mr Donohoe told an online seminar organised by the European Movement (EM).

Mr Donohoe told EM chairman, Maurice Pratt, that he first took up the job as Eurogroup president in July last year for a two-and-a-half year term. He said the demands of contact with the other 18 member governments and the heads of the EU were very time-consuming – but also proved very helpful in maximising information for Ireland’s economic responses to the Covid-19 crisis.

The Finance Minister said the virus had hit the core of how the EU works because it hampered its “interconnectedness and interdependence” by seriously hindering the human contacts which kept the project alive.

Mr Donohoe also said that the EU’s public health functions must be prepared to deal with future pandemics. “We need to be better prepared and equipped for diseases that within the space of weeks, even within the space of days, can change our societies,” the Minister said.

CEO of EM Ireland, Noelle O’Connell, who hosted this event, said Covid-19 and Brexit had delivered huge shocks to the EU and posed huge future challenges.

Online Editors