Mr. Tom Curran:

The concern many people would have is on the psychiatric illness side of things. I share that concern and that is one of the reasons it is not included in the Bill. It is quite controversial. I do not have all the answers to anything but this is something I do not have enough answers to want it included. We may get around to that some other time but certainly it is not included in this situation. There cannot be any greater safeguard than excluding it completely. What we want, as Mr. Nugent said, is the simple situation where people like Marie or Anne, who do not want to die, can avoid a bad death. That is what this all about. It is avoiding a painful death. As Mr. Nugent said about Anne, in our situation it was five years before Marie died. We imported her euthanasia drugs illegally. We imported them from Mexico using the Internet of known sources. It is a product called Nembutal. We got two bottles of Nembutal from a supplier in Mexico and they arrived by courier. Once they arrived in the house Marie started living. Her whole demeanour brightened. I have often said, and it is a strange thing to have to say, but there were two drugs that kept Ms Fleming alive and both of them were illegal. One of them was Nembutal and the other was cannabis. They kept Marie alive for years and years of her later life. Cannabis controlled her spasms and her pain like none of the pharmaceutical medications could and that is what kept her going.

However, on the question of whether I was ever suicidal, I do not think there are many people of my age who have never contemplated suicide. Ridiculously, when I was a teenager and my first relationship broke up I wanted to kill myself. I am still here. We all go through that. Unfortunately, there are a lot of people who do not. We have a huge volume of suicides and particularly with the situation that exists at the moment and the financial situation that existed in the last while. We have a huge volume of suicides among young to middle-aged men. We are doing very little to prevent that. We put a hell of a lot more effort into road safety and a lot more money into road safety that we do into suicide prevention. However, that is not what we are here to discuss. We should be putting more into that.

On the safeguards, it is very difficult for me because the Bill was drafted so long ago. However, one of the safeguards refers to two doctors and if there is any doubt about the mental capacity of the person to make rational decisions that he or she would have to be cleared by a psychiatrist. There are lots of safeguards like that built in. There are conversations and there are cooling off periods where a person says he or she wants to go now. That is not allowed because of the situation a member just spoke about, of a person changing his or her mind. There also have to be safeguards to try to determine that it is a decision that a person is making himself or herself. No safeguards that we bring in are going to be perfect. There is no such thing as a perfect society, unfortunately. There will always be people who will try to abuse any situation that is brought in. Murder is a crime but we read about murders every day of the week. Just because something is illegal does not prevent people from doing it, just as making assisted dying illegal is not preventing people from doing it. People are doing it all the time. We need a more regulated basis on which they do it. There is more likely to be abuse in an unregulated situation than there will is in a regulated situation. We will probably prevent abuse.

The other thing that is well known and has been established in other jurisdictions is that it is preventing suicides because when people realise there is an option, they go looking for that option and are identified as irrational. They get help that they would not have got otherwise because it takes so long to get psychiatric assessments. There is advantage to it from that point of view as well.

However, as I said, there will not be a situation which is a 100% foolproof. What we need to do is come as close as we can to that but just because it is not 100% foolproof does not we should deny what is basically a fundamental human right to a person to die with dignity.