Bryan Cassidy
I sat in on a working lunch meeting between Lord Graham Tope, a member of the Committee of the Regions, and Bryan Cassidy, the President of the EESC’s Section on the Single Market, production and consumption. Lord Tope is preparing a CoR opinion on better lawmaking – a theme that Bryan has specialised in for a long time now. One of the fascinating issues they discussed was the problem of ‘translation’ of EU legislation into domestic law. Bryan Cassidy is forever thumping the table about the trend for national civil servants to ‘goldplate’ EU legislation when transposing it into domestic legislation, adding on restraints and conditions that were not in the original and that help to give EU legislation a bad name. But he and Lord Tope recognised that there is a genuine cultural problem for local and regional civil servants, a further step removed from ‘Brussels’, in trying to understand the spirit of some EU laws. There are no easy solutions. Better mutual knowledge and understanding would help, but there is still so much progress to be made at the level of national civil services…
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