Dr. Conor Casey:

I thank the Senator. I am a little confused. I totally agree that we need to be very precise with language. In the Fleming judgment, the court used words like "terminated". That was the language used in the Supreme Court. I wanted to make it more anodyne, so I used phrases like "intentional killing" or "intentional taking of human life". I used those terms compendiously to refer to assistance in the taking of one's life through suicide or euthanasia. All these terms like "euthanasia" can be quite loaded but there was no intent to be inflammatory whatsoever. I was trying just to be precise and anodyne, frankly. That is the first point. There certainly was no intention to annoy or inflame, as it were.

The Senator had a question on the eighth amendment. Of course, the amendment itself had to be removed to provide for the termination of pregnancy. There is debate and Dr. Mulligan would know better than I on this question, but I think the reason there was an explicit enabling clause was that there was concern about obiter comments in judgments like the McGee case and G v. An Bord Uchtála, prior to the eighth amendment, in which the Supreme Court had said obiter that the unborn enjoyed constitutional rights, including the right to life. My understanding is that the concern was that even if the eighth amendment was repealed, there might be lingering constitutional entitlements that could be pleaded. Putting in an enabling clause did not take away the justiciability of the courts but it was a sort of signalling device to say this is an area on which the Oireachtas is explicitly entitled to legislate. That is my understanding of why there was not just a straight repeal and why an enabling provision was inserted.