 I know that you are a very informed audience, and in your own areas of activity you know everything about the regulation. So what I thought I would do is to try to put the whole process of EU regulation in its wider context. To talk about how it has evolved since the early days, where we are now, and to give a few insights into where I think we're heading for the future. Because regulation has always been an important part of the European Union, the way it does business, its architecture. That's for very fundamental political, economic and social reasons. Political because regulation is really the way in which we make the basic bargain of trust between Member States actually work. I open my markets to you if I know that there's going to be fair play. And since I don't trust a gentleman's agreement because Member States are not gentlemen, we have the commission to supervise and the Court of Justice to be the final arbiter on whether the rules are respected or not. So that basic political trust between the Member States needs regulation to make it work. It has done since the beginning. It's easy to talk about the economic benefits of regulation because it's easier to work with clear rules that don't change arbitrarily all the time. And we need a core, a common core of regulation to deliver the benefits of the single market to all of our citizens. But the social dimension of regulation is also very important. Europeans expect high standards of protection of health, of safety, of environment. And again, regulation is the way that the EU delivers on that promise to all its citizens. So these are the fundamental reasons why the EU is a community of law. It's a largely rules-based organisation. I'll talk in a moment about the tensions that that can bring. But it's also the way that we have come so far in terms of living and working together. And of course getting it right is a very complex process. We have different cultures, different standards, different ways of doing things. And it's not just because we have 28 Member States but within certain countries you have regional local rules as well. So we have a very complex set of ways of regulating to try to bring together. And let's be honest, national regulation, local regulation also plays a protective role. And so from time to time, those who are protected by particularly tweaked national ways of doing things object when the rules are changed. So it is a very complex way of doing things. I find it interesting that when we do the Eurobarometer surveys, there is a consistently higher level of public trust in the European institutions than in national governments. And I think that's because for all its faults and all the frustrations, the European system is seen to be objective, rules-based and enforced without favour. That of course in turn then generates sometimes a political dislike of the regulation because it removes that margin of discretion, that margin of manoeuvre from politicians whether they be national or local. So at every moment in time we're always dealing with a complex trade-off between what do you do from the centre because it makes sense and what do you do locally because that's where it makes sense and there are no wider implications. Last but not least in terms of the complexity, you have technology and globalization. They are changing our world very fast and faster every year and it makes it extremely difficult for bodies like the European Union which take a long time to reach decisions, not because they are inherently slow but because the need to consult and involve takes a long time. That makes it very difficult to keep regulation up to date. I suppose because I was very long time in the commission I have lived through I think all of the different periods of regulation. When I started in Brussels we were still in the full harmonization phase, the idea that everything could be done from Brussels, everything had to be the same all over Europe and that was the sort of federalist enthusiastic approach to things. And not surprisingly this ran out of steam because it wasn't either physically nor humanly possible to do everything from Brussels. I remember even as a very young official being a bit mystified about why did we want to harmonize jam jars so that you would have 226 grams in a jam jar for a half a pound of jam. But it was that kind of thing that ultimately led to the end of the total harmonization approach because it simply was not realistic. And then in 1979 we had the famous Cassie's de Dijon judgment in which the court has so often put its finger right on the spot and said if something is legally produced in one member state it should be legally able to be sold in any other member state. Now as we know real life isn't quite that simple but that's the principle and we have to keep coming back to that that we as the group of 28 countries all want to protect our citizens, protect our consumers, we all want to have high standards and so we should be able to find a system whereby we can have that trust in each other's products and services that you can feel free to buy any part of the union and get the same level of protection. And the effect of the Cassie's de Dijon ruling was to push the member states to agree on common standards which they wouldn't otherwise have agreed. And this paved the way for what was called at the time the new approach in the early 1980s where at European level we started to concentrate on basic safety standards leaving then a lot of technical detail to be worked out elsewhere including by the standards organisations which were at the time anyway deemed to be faster and better able to adapt to technical progress. At that time too there was a very strong preference for directives rather than regulation. This was partly a kickback against the total harmonisation approach and I think there is an ongoing need to have directives which set the core objectives but which allow individual member states then to implement according to their own national traditions and practices. But there is another creative tension there because if you ask most business people they would like to have the same rules right across all 28 member states without any national interpretation because it would make it easier for them to scale up. So we always have to find the right trade-off between the political need to have room for the national practices to be taken into account versus the efficiency requirement of the internal market. And that balance is struck differently at different times. It depends on what the mood is but you can never have one without the other. You can't be so efficient that everything is by regulation. You can't be so sensitive to national differences that everything can be different because then you don't have an internal market. So getting that trade-off right is a challenge every day. It was interesting as time moved on then that we had the big bang of the 1992 campaign and I think it's one of the apparent paradoxes that it was necessary to pass 300 pieces of legislation in order to deregulate. But it was, it was necessary to replace a lot of national rules and obstacles by a set of 300 pieces of European regulation. And again it's a paradox we often come to. Now what I've been also struck by in all the time I spent in Brussels was in the beginning there was very little European regulation. You had the national rules were the ones that everybody knew, they were the ones that ordered how business was done, how people interacted with government and they were the dominant body of legislation. But over time, because it made sense in so many areas to work together at European level and to have European legislation doing away with all these different national sets of rules, the amount of what we call the achilles communautaire grew and grew and grew and it was in the Deloria era that you began to see media interest in well exactly how many pages was this achilles communautaire and the figure of 80,000 pages was calculated by somebody as a shocking, as a shocking figure. But this cumulative build up and this shift in many areas to what we have today which is a predominant amount of European legislation and a relatively smaller amount of national in a way took people by surprise. And I think it was only with the fall of the Berlin Wall and with the beginning of the very intensive pre-accession process preparing the countries of Central and Eastern Europe for membership that we really started to react to this maturing of the body of European legislation. And it was illustrated for me that the commission actually had no single database where we could say authoritatively this is the achilles communautaire. Only DG Agri had something called the Blue Angel, I don't know why but the Blue Angel was a big ledger somewhere where somebody had written in every piece of legislation so only the common agriculture policy knew what it's achilles was and in the beginning of the pre-accession process with the Central and Eastern European member countries lots of DGs were running around trying to put together compendiums of what was actually their legislation so we could then take the candidate countries through it and help them prepare to exceed. And that was a big difference from the last accession of Spain and Portugal in the 80s. By the time we had the accession of the mid 1990s those countries had been in after and so there had been the alignment of the legislation so it made it a very easy accession but the last one where two countries, Spain and Portugal coming from a very different system into the European Union they had joined a much less integrated and therefore much less regulated and much less demanding European Union so it was a big effort and of course that effort now goes on ever since. This gradual dawning of realisation that actually the body of European legislation was big and important and had to be treated as such also led over time to the development of a lot of agencies because it was realised that the commission itself could never have the technical expertise to implement the legislation and also the commission doesn't have a function to implement legislation it proposes it, it polices it, it enforces it but it doesn't actually implement it so all of these were developments which when you look back on it had a certain logic but at the time each one was breaking new ground it was novel, it was a different way of working and I think the final historic element that I want to put into this mix in the last 15 years in particular or so you have had primarily in the debate in the UK the domestic debate about well who's actually in charge and is it Westminster that ultimately decides or is it Brussels and the supposedly unelected politicians in Brussels who decide that constant attrition coming from the UK in particular was gradually taken up by a number of other member states mainly northern member states so there was this kind of feeling then that there was too much regulation coming from Brussels and something had to be done about it now all of this is political and one of the things that certainly struck very few people from the Lisbon Treaty was the way that cometology changed and there was an attempt in the Lisbon Treaty to simplify the downstream of deciding on the big principles of legislation to downstream to deal more efficiently with the downstream way in which we make technical regulation through delegated acts and implementing acts but like everything else that also became a political football between council and parliament and you still have today a battle between the two arms of the co-legislator one preferring the one it thinks gives it more power the other one determined not to let the other one have that one and wanting the other one so constantly what seems to be very technical is actually very political and the commission too saw it as a power play and wanting to please one time one one time the other would go more for an implementing one more for a delegated act the commission has now lost a court case on that and has bowed out from that field it will let the council and parliament decide what's the nature of the implementing act or the delegated act and I think probably very wisely but while all of this was going on the commission was also beginning to realise the change that had taken place if you go back to the early period I was referring to you had a situation where in most national ministries and departments there was relatively little knowledge of the Aki community it was a kind of specialised thing but over the years you have had a complete shift and now every head of unit in any ministry in any member state will be very familiar with and know and understand not just what the rules say but also their impact and so in a way you've had a reversal the commission has lost that expertise that it used to uniquely have because it's shared and rightly so but what the commission doesn't have is that knowledge of the implementation that the member states now have through years of working with European legislation and what we have to find is a way to bring that knowledge and understanding into the decision making processes in Brussels because regulation will only work if it seemed to deliver and if it seemed to be sensible so this has brought us to the era of what we now call better regulation and I think this has been this is something I was very much involved in myself and I think it is a real attempt by the commission to understand the political reticence to having so much regulation decided in Brussels even where the argument for doing so is overwhelming so there's much more investment now in consultation the commission publishes its work programme sets out what it's thinking of working on involves interest groups then does impact assessment to try to cost and quantify the costs and benefits of the different options it's looking at and only after that long preparatory phase does a proposal actually go to council and parliament for decision I think that there's lots of positive aspects to this because I think it means that there should be no surprises everybody should know for a long time in advance that the proposal is being worked on it allows the commission to draw in so much expertise that it could never have no civil service could have the amount of expertise that you can get by consulting member states business organisations NGOs, social groups the public allows you to draw in a lot of expertise to fine tune decisions to prepare in advance for implementation issues that will arise but like everything in life it also has drawbacks and it is very cumbersome it takes time sometimes the process can be captured by lobbies or is perceived to be captured by different lobbies and very often the process is perceived as dragging the standard down to the lowest common denominator rather than pulling it up to the highest level necessary but this is part of a big cultural change and I think the final piece in that cultural change came with the arrival of President Junker who has made a solemn promise that the commission will overall do less in the future now I think this is first and foremost a response to the political perception of Brussels doing too much and I think when he was on the campaign trail campaigning to be president of the commission he was quite shocked by meeting so many ordinary people who said look you know it's too complicated ties us up in knots we don't see the point of it it's a very democratic machinery so it's a very personal commitment from him but a very political one I also think it makes a lot of sense because in a lot of areas we have now a very full body of legislation which is very mature and it doesn't need to be constantly revisited to squeeze the last 1% improvement out of it what it does need is a much stronger focus on implementation and a much stronger focus on enforcement and implementation is also part of the basic bargain between member states they have to believe each other that when they sign up to difficult compromises that they will all go home and implement the same thing and that isn't always the case and I still am naive enough to find a shocking that member states have to be find sometimes more than once in order to live up to the side of the bargain that they themselves freely democratically struck at one point in time so the commission has been stepping up the emphasis on enforcement on implementation it has developed something called EU pilot to allow it to have a friendly dialogue with member states about infringement proceedings to clear up a lot of things it's surprising particularly in more federal countries how often the centre isn't even aware that there's an infringement of the rules because the competence is at local level or regional level so something like EU pilot allows before you get into a very heavy legal process just to clear up issues like that and it is interesting to see regularly implementation issues coming up even to the European Council where member states want to contest the basic agreements that they have struck between each other or the fact that the commission is taking them to court it shows the importance of having a neutral body that does the enforcement, does the policing of implementation I think also review and revision of on-going regulation is very important but it is much more difficult than in a national context if you have a law in a country that goes back 40 or 50 years and it's clearly not adapted to current day reality there isn't much debate about updating it but in a European context you have something that was worked out over many years a delicate web of compromises with everybody giving everybody getting and it's very difficult then to open it up again because opening it up again you take back all the compromises that were made and you don't quite start with a clean slate but you certainly risk reopening all the compromises and itself is reluctant to reopen important pieces of legislation because in the current climate it feels that some of the major advances in terms of European integration would immediately be cancelled because the member states today would not sign up to things that they signed up two years ago so that does pose a particular problem for keeping European regulation up to date and very often rather than opening an old directive the commission and the legislature go to extraordinary lengths to try to add a regulation to it or to build something in parallel rather than to call the basic bargain into question and that does make it difficult sometimes then to explain to people why we don't revisit directives that were adopted in the 1960s and the 1970s but if you don't understand that context then you will never understand how to operate in the European Union it's not just because something is old that it's necessarily needs to be demolished you have to find a way and I think we have not yet found a good way to keep the advances that we have made in the past but to update the way in which we implement and apply them and I see that as a particular challenge on which we need to work harder I also want to talk a little bit about the growing importance of regulation as an international issue I think in recent years as tariff levels have come down everywhere the process that we went through in the EU you can now see it going beginning to develop internationally and the best example I can give of that is the t-tip you have the EU and the United States both rules based systems if you like but of course over time we have developed different ways of working and you have two big negotiating groups who are both of whom are most used to dealing with smaller countries not used to dealing with equals and so you have coming together of reasons why transatlantic single market would be a good idea the same reasons why we have them in the EU to have the certainty that the other side will respect the agreed rules and also that fewer differences would be good for trade but even where you have industrial sectors who can agree on which regulations they would merge, abolish or whatever in order to make trade easier there you also have the regulators are more wary and the governments are more wary one of the problems I think is because trade negotiators on the whole are not used to dealing with regulatory issues so probably in future other regulatory bodies will have to be involved in international regulations and if you're interested in this kind of thing there is a study which was done on behalf of the commission by two professors Parker and Alomano and they made a comparison of how regulation works on both sides of the Atlantic and it's a very interesting description of the house and the wise and they come to the conclusion that in fact when you strip away all the differences actually we're trying to do the same thing and there are many many similarities but they do have one paragraph that I want to quote because I think it really sums up the difference between how we regulate in Europe and how we do it in the US and they say the design of the legislative and regulatory processes in the EU strikes an institutional balance not between three coordinating branches of power as in the US but rather among the union as a super national entity the member states of sovereign nations and the European Parliament representing the European citizenry in the process and that's a fundamentally different thing from what the US as a federal country does so we're negotiating as I say two blocks equal and it's the first time for us to have that neither of us has the intention of fundamentally changing our own systems you can imagine just trying to start changing what the EU has built up over more than 60 years neither of us is going to accept the other system I think we're both realistic enough for that so what we're looking for is how do you take two different systems and how do you find a way forward for the future that will allow the two big rules based systems in the world to set international standards for the future because if the EU and the US agree to set standards make regulations in certain areas I have little doubt but that the rest of the world will follow and I equally have little doubt that if we don't succeed in doing it it will be others who don't follow rules systems who follow might is right approaches who will dominate internationally in the future so for me that is the most important potential benefit of TTIP and worth fighting for so I just wanted to develop that a little bit because I see this growth in the need to have regulation at international level and the TTIP has a very good example of how we will iron out which will take time to iron out some of the differences that emerge I don't want to go on too long because I want to hear from you as well I hope we can have a sort of question and answer or comment and reaction session in the future but let me sum up by saying this in particular for the reasons that I've given I think regulation will remain an essential part of the EU way of working now what we regulate and how we do it will change from time to time as I've said, from the sort of early federalist let's harmonise everything we can get our hands on to the yncher commitment that we will do less because Brussels should only concentrate on the essentials Member States are more than capable of dealing with everything else I think we have many many difficulties to overcome and trying to get this balance right European society is aging and as we age we tend to become more risk averse and in many countries people are calling for ever more detailed rules and I think that's, I observe that that's the case here too since I'm spending more time in Ireland now it makes sense to do some of this at European level but it doesn't make sense to do a lot of it at European level and that's also quite hard to explain to people no, you have a good idea there is a problem somebody needs to do something about it but it shouldn't be Brussels who does it that is just as difficult for the commission to make the case for as it was years ago to make the case for doing something so we've arrived at a different point in the political cycle but where we need to be clear what should be done at European level together and what Member States should be perfectly free to do or not to do at home as they see fit I think the need for national expertise is huge and I think that is going to be the way of working together in the future and that's why I think it's an excellent idea to have a network of national regulators because I think in their own domain each regulator of course knows more than anybody else but there is a cross disciplinary need to bring regulators together and also to think about the cumulative impact of regulation that is very very difficult to do at European level or national level but I think we have to be more conscious of that in the future and try to have an exchange of information that allows us to see that if something is being done in one area it will have either a positive or a negative impact on the other or that instead of doing everything separately we could perhaps put things together to make it easier for our society or for operators to be part of understanding intelligent legislation and that's why I think it's very important to see the first of these kind of meetings coming together I think maybe the crisis of the last years has made Ireland inward looking for lots of reasons and also lack of resources has probably made it very difficult to participate as fully as we would have liked in all the European networks but I hope that we're coming out of that time now and I think it's really important that Irish regulators find the right way to work with the civil service and our national representatives to work on the European regulatory framework at an early stage because at an early stage there is a genuine openness a wish to receive the practice, the evidence that's the necessary basis for a regulatory framework that will be accepted by the population and it gets harder as the process goes further it gets harder to influence but I think that with our experience we have a lot that we can contribute to the European regulatory framework so I really would strongly urge you to to be involved even if it is boring and time consuming and even if it is resource intensive because as I said it stays there for so long and because it has such a global impact I think it's a really worthwhile investment so my conclusion is that you already can see that the regulatory framework is very important but it needs much more investment than in earlier years it needs the involvement of those who can tell the system the co-legislators in Brussels what is working, what is not working we need to build up a confidence among the regulatory community and with the political community that allows us to reopen occasionally important pieces of legislation because they need to be overhauled some kind of a political bargain struck on what's going to be touched and not touched if we're going to be able to do that but fundamentally I think we have to find the confidence to do that because as I said I think a regulatory system that's based on consultation evidence and that has been thought about in terms of do we need to do this at European level or do we not need to do it at European level that's the kind of regulatory framework that will have broad public acceptance even if people quibble over the detail if we don't succeed in doing that then it will be one more reason why people feel unenthusiastic or frustrated with what goes on in Brussels in their name and I think that would be a shame