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

Counterintuitively, what the professor was suggesting is that given that the positions are so well remunerated, one would imagine there would be more professionals seeking to do it whereas there are very few professional medics engaged in this.

We have had palliative care experts give testimony to the committee that there is a pain beyond the reach of palliative care and that there are situations beyond the reach of such care. That is one of the issues that has exercised my mind.

When we started our work here, I was one of the people who said that this work concerns the great questions of life. Where do we come from? Why are we here? What happens when we die? If one is a believer and one believes that this life is a pathway to another life, then suffering makes a certain amount of sense. However, if one believes that this is it and that when one dies the shutters come down, then while suffering might still make a certain amount of sense, I suspect it makes less sense. It is very much embedded in the outlook of Judeo-Christian religions that one offers it up, it will be worth it and one's reward will be significant for having coped with it. It is one of the things I have tried to probe here because culturally, it is so anathema to what we have been used to here in Ireland. How would one eulogise a person whose death was a result of euthanasia or assisted dying? Would it be seen as a lesser death? I do not think we have got to that place here, but I have seen testimony from other countries, particularly Australia and New Zealand, and was particularly struck by the compassionate nature of their approach. We are talking about 1% of deaths. I think the average in Canada is 3.3%. It might have been 7% in Quebec but even 3.3% is outrageously high, in terms of where they are going.

In the Christian way of viewing things, there is a nobility and a dignity in suffering, or at least that is what we have come to understand or accept.

We do not see the torture or the torment so much.

I want to ask a question about coercion. We have heard that word quite a bit but every time I push witnesses for a little bit of anecdotal evidence, if that is not a contradiction, it is hard to elicit it. It is an issue that concerns me. Have any of our guests anything to say on this or do they have direct evidence of coercion, where they are convinced a patient was coerced into making a decision that was not in his or her own best interests?