Professor Mary Donnelly:

I cannot give a straight answer on how many suicide prevention programmes there are and how effective they are. I want to address the point that Professor Jones has just made in relation to a person being offered assisted dying in a Canadian context. Both the New Zealand and the Victoria legislation make it clear that a doctor cannot initiate the conversation on assisted dying. That is something which is workable and can be addressed. Many of these issues are things that can be addressed. As I mentioned earlier, it is really important that we do not think about this in some kind of abstract sense, but actually about the measures we can take, if we consider them to be appropriate.

On the issue of modification, can I just check, does the Deputy mean notification when a person makes one that they tell people? Okay. In Ireland, the notification requirements are for enduring powers of attorney, EPA, not for advanced healthcare directives. There is actually no formal notification requirement for an advance healthcare directive. Obviously, one of the things which doctors will say to people and which the code of practice in advance healthcare directive would stress is that if people are making an advance healthcare directive there is no point in them keeping it in their bag at home. They have to inform people, but it is not a technical or formal requirement. That is not to say that it would not be within the realm of legislation to introduce a requirement, for example, that an assisted dying request should be informed, for example, to the Decision Support Service. At the moment, it is not a requirement but there are clear requirements for EPAs. That is a question we would have to consider. The question would be whether, if we were to do this, we would introduce some form of notification requirements. These are all safeguards that can be worked in.