Dr. Seán Ó Domhnaill:

I will respond to three points. One pertains to the issue of proportionality of risk and I suggest this is something that probably could be brought up with the legal experts because recent Supreme Court rulings have changed the position on the measurement of proportionality and that in turn will have had an impact on the X case, in so far as it now applies in law.

Second, in regard to how one responds to somebody who looks one in the eye and threatens to do something unless one provides them with the specific treatment they seek, in the case of the Bill if someone is demanding an abortion or that they be given whatever it is they require to get an abortion, it would not be a new scenario. I have worked most of my life in inner city Dublin. I have had many hundreds of patients, at all hours of the day and night, look me in the eye and tell me that if I did not provide them with the specific treatment they wanted at the time, they would kill themselves. They usually referred to throwing themselves under a bus. The specific treatment they sought was invariably chemical and it was usually named benzodiazepine. To date, none of them went out and completed the act, despite the fact that none of them were given the specific treatment they requested. They were, however, given the treatment I would expect to give to anybody who was in an acute state of distress, which is support, counselling and time, which is probably the most important thing one would ever give to someone in psychiatry. Time allows them to come down from that heightened state and begin to look at their situation with a little more clarity so that there is more light when the heat subsides. I hope that psychiatry provides people with hope because in my experience that is probably in any age, and in particular in this recessionary interval, the best thing psychiatry can offer, certainly not the counsel of despair which is what I would consider the recommendation of abortion as a treatment to be.