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

I echo what colleagues said and thank the Chair for the manner in which he has chaired the public sessions. I commend the secretariat and support staff who have provided us with a huge amount of invaluable work and research and background assistance as we move into the final stage of this. I thank our witnesses for coming today.

I take a different view from previous speakers. I think the Department of Health and HSE might face severe criticism on the other side of the coin if it was seen they were breaking ground developing policy on a assisted dying. That perspective also needs to be stressed for balance.

I found the witnesses' papers really interesting. Even from some of the basic statistics, I did not realise that approximately 30,000 people die every year. That is the average figure in Ireland. I did not realise until now that palliative care was available and applied to individuals of any age, including children who have life-limiting illnesses, and that it encompassed that. I was ignorant on that point.

I have a couple of questions. There are also a couple of things that are worth noting given the work we do and the contributions that have been made here. The amount of budget that is provided for palliative care surprised me. It is very significant and I really do welcome that. I welcome the switch. The Government needs to be commended on the amount of funding for palliative care and particularly palliative care in hospices. If there is a person in Ireland who has not experienced interventions of palliative care, whether it is in the home or in the hospices themselves, the huge amount of funding they have is allied to the Government funding they get. The global figure surprised me in terms of its scale. While not being complacent or smug about it, the State gives a very significant piece of funding to palliative care. Clearly, it has to improve.

I acknowledge in the statement the change in status from section 39 to section 38, again, under this Government, which made a significant difference and provided close to an additional €20 million to hospices. They are really important pieces.

The way other countries handle this has impacted me, certainly as we have done our work. I read in The Guardiannewspaper at the weekend that 5.1% of all deaths in 2022 in the Netherlands were by euthanasia. We heard from previous witnesses that the figure is over 3% in Canada. I am very struck, in a neutral way, at the gap between here and other jurisdictions. I am appalled in some cases, but compassionate, too, in others. I was very struck by the story about the former Dutch Prime Minister, Dries van Agt, and his wife, who were both 93. He was Catholic and founder of the Christian Democratic Appeal party. They both died by euthanasia at the weekend. It was clearly an agreement between themselves. They sounded like intelligent people who led full lives, and political lives, and were very active. Those kinds of things arrest me in my thinking as part of this whole process. Like Deputy Higgins, I have certainly found myself oscillating between positions as we have gone through our work.

The HSE representatives mentioned the intergenerational impact. They might just say a little more about that because I do not think we have heard a lot about it. They cite that there is obviously an intergenerational impact of suicide on successive generations, and that there might be a danger that legalising assisted dying or euthanasia could have an intergenerational impact that would make it easier or more open as an option.

I am also interested in the HSE piece about palliative care - providing high-quality assessment and treatment of pain and other physical, psychosocial and spiritual problems. Will the HSE representatives address that because it is an issue for me? Is that just for people who have very strong faiths or people who have none? That is a question we did not get an awful lot of time to go into. Those are my questions for now.