Mary Seery Kearney (Fine Gael)
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I thank Dr. Campbell for that. I will come back to a couple of issues, the first of which is that in our current regime, we have the possibility that I can refuse intervention and nutrition. Last week, I explored the possibility that I could put in an advanced healthcare directive. However, Dr. Mulligan told me that, yes, in theoretical law, it could be done by getting medical practitioners to actually exercise it in a circumstance where I no longer had capacity, which is probably very unlikely.

We move on now to that positive act. If we are legislating, presumably then we could look at where an advanced healthcare directive will facilitate that positive act to assist dying for the individual. That engages two things for me, one of which comes back to Senator Ruane's question around a person who is under the care of a particular medical team in which there are individuals who will refuse to facilitate assisted dying. I assume that we are also going to have to legislate for the possibility of medical practitioners who, in an exercise of their own conscience, will refuse to be practitioners who will facilitate assisted dying. Therefore, if a person is under the care of that team in the process of his or her diagnosis, is there a mechanism? Are there other experiences of that where a person gets to move to another team? How does that happen?

The next issue for me would be that capacity perhaps changes with diagnosis. I am sitting here today with no diagnosis and nothing wrong, thankfully, but I have a view of what I might like to do or not do in certain circumstances. Faced with the reality, that might be very different. That context changes capacity. In the questions in the sort of interviews that go on, does it allow for those changes and the subtlety that it might change again? At the beginning of a diagnosis, I might say that when I reach a certain point, at that point, if we say it is within the parameters of six months from death or whatever medical criteria we put down, then I want that exercised. That may change, however. That perspective may change because it may well be that that is my child's wedding and I want to be there within that timeframe and I just want to be cared for enough to be able to get there. How do we manage that? Is it a repeated assessment? Should we be considering managing that?