Irish Examiner view: National recovery plan will be tough but bills must be paid

Our Marshall Plan should contribute to reviving the national mood and encouraging the discipline needed to finally see off the pandemic

Taoiseach Micheál Martin; Tánaiste Leo Varadkar; and Minister for Health, Stephen Donnelly, TD on their way to the Government's announcement setting out the Plan for Covid Resilience and National Recovery. Picture: Julien Behal Photography

People of a certain age, if their memory is not playing tricks on them, will remember school vaccination programmes, where a sugar lump was doused with an antidote to make it easier to administer to reticent, fidgety national school scholars. Others older still, and students of modern history too, will recall how in 1948 the Marshall Plan laid the foundations for a renewed and affluent Europe by transferring $13bn from America’s coffers to Western European economies after the end of the Second World War.

In the grand scheme of things, it might seem fanciful to
describe yesterday’s publication of our €3.6bn National Economic Recovery Plan — almost €1bn comes from the EU’s recovery fund — as an Irish Marshall Plan but, in a national context, the programme is every bit as important. Replete with scores of sugar lumps doused with extract of pragmatism to sweeten hard decisions, the scale of the package puts it on a par with conventional budget days.