Stephen Collins: Doubts grow over Von der Leyen’s stewardship

Taoiseach Micheál Martin’s objection to European Commission plans to impose export bans on Covid vaccines was an unusually strong and important diplomatic intervention by Ireland. It played a part in promoting a compromise deal with the UK which averted a potentially disastrous trade war over vaccines.

Martin made no bones about his opposition to the notion of a vaccine export ban being floated by the Commission with the apparent backing of France and Germany. He went public on a number of occasions early in the week to make it clear that he was very much against the proposal and similarly trenchant views were expressed by European Affairs Minister Thomas Byrne.

Irish governments rarely adopt a strong position at European level that goes against the views of the Commission and the powerful Franco/German axis so the intervention on the proposed vaccine ban represented a risky step.

It helped that the Irish view was shared by with a number of important middle ranking and influential states like the Netherlands, Belgium and Sweden. All of them believed that a trade war would have played havoc with long-established vaccine supply chains which are vital in tackling the Covid pandemic.

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By challenging the aggressive line on an export ban adopted by Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, Ireland and its allies saved the EU from doing serious damage to its reputation as a beacon of free trade as well as ensuring that the vaccine roll-out across the globe proceeds as speedily as possible.

As Wexford Labour TD Brendan Howlin put it in the Dáil on Tuesday: “The EU has somehow managed to put itself in the past week or so in the position of being seen as the aggressor, threatening to stop the export of vaccines, when in truth since February more than 40 million vaccines have left the European Union to 33 other nations, including 10 million vaccines which were exported from the European Union to the United Kingdom.”

The anger across the EU at the way in which its citizens are being deprived of vaccine supplies being manufactured in its member states is perfectly understandable and some plan of action was certainly required to force the major pharmaceutical companies, particularly AstraZeneca, to honour their contracts.

The jingoistic sneering at the EU’s travails in the British Tory press, encouraged by some of the Conservative Brexiteer MPs, did not help matters as it naturally fuelled a determination by the Commission and the bigger members states to rectify the position come what may.

The penny appears to have dropped with Johnson that the UK's efficient vaccine rollout would be threatened by a vaccine war

The problem was that Von der Leyen let annoyance cloud her judgement and, just as in the ill-fated attempt to invoke the Northern Ireland protocol, she proposed a course of action that would have done more harm than good in the long term to the people and institutions she is mandated to protect.

There was more than a hint that she was playing German politics by responding to the anger in her homeland at the pace of the vaccine rollout and the continuing level of restrictions there. She has now made a succession of blunders, beginning with the haggling over prices with the pharmaceutical companies that allowed the British to steal a march on the EU in the first place. Her mistakes have raised questions about whether she is the right person for such an important post.

Most dismal

Former UK foreign secretary William Hague mused earlier this week on how much the EU missed the political skills of Jean-Claude Juncker.

“Having joined in the British effort in 2014 to try to prevent Juncker from becoming Commission president, I never thought I would one day wish he was back. Yet the months since his departure, in which a new Commission led by Ursula von der Leyen has been wrestling with the EU vaccines scheme, have been among the most dismal in its existence.”

In the end a ban on vaccine exports from the EU was averted through a combination of opposition by a number of states, including Ireland, to overly aggressive measures and the dawning British realisation of the damage a vaccine war would do to them. The penny appears to have dropped with Boris Johnson that the efficient vaccine rollout which has restored his political appeal to the British public would be threatened by a vaccine war.

His government’s controversial decision to leave 12 weeks before the first and second doses of the vaccine in order to maximise the number of people with some protection against Covid has proved to be the right one. However, that strategy could have come unstuck if second doses were suddenly unavailable as a result of an EU export ban.

On Tuesday night Johnson boasted to his MPs that the success of the British approach relative to the EU was down to “greed”. By the following evening he had changed his tune and agreed to a joint statement with the EU that they would both co-operate in improving the vaccine rollout.

“We are all facing the same pandemic and the third wave makes co-operation between the EU and UK even more important,” said the statement.

Hopefully both will have learned from the experience and the important thing now is to ensure that the vaccine rollout across the EU is ramped up rapidly as new supplies become available.