Mary Mitchell O'Connor (Dún Laoghaire, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the witnesses for their empathetic presentations and, in particular, for their discussion of holistic death compared to clinical death. I acknowledge their concerns about costs. They are being very respectful with their language in this discussion but when the issue emerges into he public domain, the focus for us will probably be on assisted suicide and euthanasia and some of what they said will be forgotten. How can we separate the two issues to make them work for the person who is dying and his or her family so that euthanasia is not the only focus for the media?

Professor O'Shea advised that we need to upskill doctors and somebody else spoke about upskilling lawyers. Is that happening as part of the training programme for young doctors or do we need to retrain them to deal with death properly?