Professor Kevin Malone:

I will try to answer two questions. The first relates to the science question. I refer the committee to a paper I wrote in the American Journal of Psychiatry in 1995 about clinical versus research assessment of suicidal behaviour in major psychiatric disorders which refers to the strengths and weaknesses of any type of predictive modelling, which was obviously peer-reviewed by international scientists.

The second point I make is that, because suicide in pregnancy, at 500,000:1, is such a rare event, it is statistically impossible to construct any type of predictive modelling. That is where we stand on that. One will never be able to construct a predictive model.

The third point I address relates to the question I have raised about normalisation through an amplified signal and in this legislation, writing suicidality into Irish law. I have just published a study on suicide in Ireland where the problem is very particular to young men and there is a clustering problem in young men. These young men are frequently at the margins of society and they are vulnerable. I think introducing something that makes suicidality okay for some people for certain social needs really creates a challenge for Irish society.

Then, on the second point, if one increases inadvertently male suicide - we have done a study of female suicides - there is a two-year lagged effect. When male suicide rates increase in Ireland, two years later one will get an increase in the female suicide rates. We have documented that over a 15 year period.