Professor Desmond O'Neill:

To respond to the first question, I will use an analogy about alcohol and heart disease. We know that if one drinks no alcohol or lots of alcohol, one is more likely to have heart disease. Should we, therefore, tell those who do not drink alcohol to start doing so? The answer is "No" because we know that in doing so it is almost certain that we would generate alcohol dependency and misery. The answer to the first question is that the cost of providing such reassurance is effective implementation of assisted suicide. The question is when does one discuss with someone who has multiple sclerosis what death will be like. This may prompt a discussion among certain people, a checklist which asks, "Which of these matters would you like to discuss?", or a more proactive way of discussing the matter. I have seen many people with multiple sclerosis die, nearly always comfortably. There is distress around death, and one cannot separate that out. The answer is that it would be burning down one's house to save the dog kennel.

Palliative care sedation is very well teased out in the literature. The number one point is that this was presumably discussed with Senator Black's late mother and father and they gave consent to taking morphine. As part of the package of care, the primary aim is to reduce pain. There is no strong sense of this unduly hastening death above and beyond the disease processes that carry on otherwise. It is possible it has a role in it. However, its aim is not to do that; its aim is to make one comfortable with one's consent.

The greatest abuse is the erosion of our sense of humans despite whatever vulnerability we have, of our sense as relational beings who have a relation to one another and care for one another. As I said, it is a sense of becoming human beings in the Ayn Rand, neo-liberal mould. The most recent prizes in economics have been awarded in the field of neuro-economics, which shows that although we prize the rational - of course it is important and it is the pinnacle of many of our achievements - many of our decisions are made on the basis of relations and emotions. It is a question of an assault on our ability to encompass the full spectrum of human experience and to recognise our own existential vulnerability and embrace it.