Mary Seery Kearney (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Dr. McDonagh's testimony was very powerful and I feel totally inadequate in following her with a question other than to say that it is very powerful. I also hear Dr. McDonagh make the point regarding Travellers and suicide and the value of people in our State. I very much hear and want to honour that.

I also want to address something from the last round of questions where Professor O'Neill referred to an editorial in The Lancet, entitled Preventing healers from becoming killers. I believe that without that clarification, there is an inference that the subject matter of that article has to do with assisted dying when, in fact, it does not. We need to clear that up for this committee. That article refers to The LancetCommission on medicine, Nazism, and the Holocaust: historical evidence, implications for today, teaching for tomorrow, and is about the fact that medical people got involved in medical research using victims of the Holocaust and people who were incarcerated during it. It also concerns the fact that some medical and teaching institutions still hold human remains from that time, their research is derived from that time and the ethics of that and how it should be dealt with. It is important that we do not inadvertently mislead this committee that the title of an article is somehow attached and I do not appreciate that that might be left in the ether. I agree with much of what Professor O'Neill said but the fact that article was referred to in this context makes me call into question some of it.