It was not mentioned in his address to the French Senate's Committee of Social Affairs, and Mr David Byrne, the EU Commissioner for Health and Consumer Protection, did not say so.
But his visit to Paris yesterday was a peacemaking mission.
Mr Jean Glavany, the Agriculture Minister who opposed him in the British beef row, invited Mr Byrne for coffee under the chestnut trees in the garden of his 18th-century ministry. They called one another "Jean" and "David". And although Mr Byrne continues a lawsuit against France, Mr Glavany accepted his invitation to spend a weekend in Ireland in July.
Mr Byrne says that being an EU Commissioner is "slightly less stressful than being the legal adviser to a minority coalition government". He resigned as Ireland's Attorney General when he was nominated to join the EU Commission last year.
But his new job has its drawbacks. It fell to Mr Byrne to initiate legal proceedings against France last winter, when Paris defied the EU Commission by maintaining its embargo on British beef. Since then, his contacts with French officials have rarely gone beyond cold nods in the corridors of international meetings.
Now there are more pressing matters than the EU's difference with France over beef. Chief among them are Mr Byrne's attempts to establish a European Food Authority by 2002. France has had its share of food scares, including a listeria outbreak which killed at least 10 people last winter. In August 1999, the month before Mr Byrne took office, a scandal over the use of sewage in French animal feed raised calls for a Europe-wide authority.
Mr Byrne wants his European Food Authority to focus on risk assessment and risk management. He does not think it should be modelled on the 80-year-old US Food and Drug Administration, which is part of the US government. The European body will be independent of the Commission and will not be responsible for regulation, as the FDA is.
As Mr Christian Poncelet, the President of the French Senate, said when thanking Mr Byrne for his speech, "crisis is a good catalyst for legislation".
Had it not been for BSE, dioxin in chicken and salmonella in eggs, Mr Byrne would not be presenting a draft law on the European Food Authority to the European Parliament in Strasbourg in October.
Mr Byrne said that the Belgian government reacted far more quickly to a dioxin scare this week than to a more serious crisis last summer. "It was limited to one compound feed manufacturer", he said. "The authorities are identifying the farms that received the feed and have embargoed the sale or removal of any of the pigs or cattle on those farms."
The EU has declared a moratorium on the growing of genetically modified organisms, al though GMOs have been grown in Britain, Spain and the Netherlands. "The existing legislation is not satisfactory and is under amendment", Mr Byrne said.
The environmental group Greenpeace claimed yesterday that 15 per cent of European cornfields were now planted with GMOs. Mr Byrne did not know if the percentage was correct, but he emphasised that "unauthorised substances cannot be allowed".
On another issue - the continuing row in the World Trade Organisation over the EU's refusal to import US hormone-fed beef - Mr Byrne says the WTO's finding is based on a "procedural defect". European scientists this month reconfirmed that one of the hormones served in a cocktail with two others is carcinogenic.
Like the lawyer he is, Mr Byrne is still waging the legal battle. "Maybe it's my background", he says, "but I don't like untidy legislation."
