Mary Seery Kearney (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

That brings me neatly to my consideration of safety from the perspective of our being before legislation or even before articulating a view back to our Parliament in our recommendations. The safety I consider involves things like the robustness of consent. There are other areas we are legislating for at the moment - surrogacy, for instance - and we look for counselling in advance for all parties involved, legal advice and the robustness of that. In the context of this conversation, however, we have heard that if there is a presumption of capacity, that needs to be safeguarded, yet we also need to safeguard to know that a person is freely making these decisions. That, to me, is an essential element of safety.

I am also considering other things. When we talk about societal claims, how will we test whether or not people's perceptions have changed? I am not convinced we can. We see that even in political polls. We have seen the evidence that people were unwilling to say during the 2016 election campaign in America that they would vote for President Trump. There was then a change in perception. I think, therefore, that people can misrepresent themselves in polls or their views can change depending on what is socially acceptable. I feel that across a lot of areas. How, then, would we ever really measure whether there had been changes in attitudes? That is where my concern lies. How do we look for that? How do we test it? When Professor White says there have not been changes, how does he know that with any level of certainty?

I am a little confused because we have previously had evidence before us that in the likes of the Netherlands and in other jurisdictions a disproportionately high number of older single women avail of assisted dying as an option in its various forms. There would therefore seem to be a trend of their being a vulnerable group, or do we even all have the same definition in our head when we talk about vulnerable groups?

There were a lot of questions there for whoever wishes to come in.