John Lahart (Dublin South West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I will go through some points. These are directed towards our visitors. I ask them to tell us about some of those conditions that they have come across. They did not, in my hearing, mention burden. I thought it was interesting that none of the patients they have encountered mentioned being a burden as a reason for wanting to end their lives. We are clearly dealing with an Australia and a New Zealand system that envisages voluntary assisted dying at the very end of the very end of life. Are the vast majority of those who receive assisted dying in palliative care? I want to put it on the record again that I prefer to talk about symptoms as opposed to conditions.

I want to be sensitive about this. We have recently heard some interventions in the context of the death penalty in the USA, which have ended up horrendously. What guarantees are there if there are interventions at the very end of life that they do not end up in a more harrowing experience of death for the patient than if they proceeded to death under heavy sedation or naturally? Has there ever been a case, in the witnesses' experience, where a patient endured a more harrowing death as a result of VAD? It includes 1.5% of deaths in Australia and New Zealand and 3% or 3.5% in Canada. I am interested in those.

I have a question for the Medical Council. If the State decided, in whatever circumstances, with restrictions or whatever, to facilitate or legislate voluntary assisted dying, what paragraph would appear in the Medical Council's advice?