Dr. Louise Campbell:

On what has changed, I certainly see there are philosophical but primarily clinical differences between acceding to a request to withdraw treatment on the one hand and acceding to a request to terminate a life on the other. I will leave that until later because it will take up some time to address it.

What has changed is that we are a more pluralistic society in Ireland now. That means we can tolerate value differences and value conflicts that might not have been tolerated when there was a more dominant or hegemonic ideology. We now see that people have legitimate value-based disagreements regarding certain seminal issues. As a society, we must allow for that. How this plays out in the debate about assisted dying is that we see now that there is no universal or objective definition of suffering. One person does not have grounds, or any legitimate reason, for interpreting another person's description of his or her suffering on his or her own terms. We have to allow people the right to say that on their terms, in accordance with their values, and as somebody who has thought about what is important to them, they find the suffering they are enduring unbearable.