Dr. Simon Mills:

I may well have been forceful but I hope I did not make it in a contemptuous or dismissive fashion. It is an important point. I should say that I am not entirely sure what the Senator's question is. At the tail end of it seems to be whether there are complicated philosophical issues about how society might view itself in the event that the legislation was changed.

There may well be scope for complicated philosophical discussion, but it is just that - philosophical. Is it a philosophical discussion that would prevent members from legislating? I am not sure. Is it a philosophical discussion that might frame the legislation they sought to introduce? Perhaps. There are complicated philosophical discussions involved with every single piece of legislation the members introduce. The fact that this concerns issues of living and dying attracts a particular scrutiny because we are who we are. We are conscious of our mortality and the fact that we die. We are conscious of all sorts of things. We reserve a special status for our own life and death that we do not necessarily reserve for the life and death of other living creatures. All of that makes this important but they are part of the conversations that are had around every piece of legislation that is introduced. No particular philosophical issue is ever going to be a bar on the Oireachtas coming to a conclusion that there is a solution to the philosophical questions that are raised.

That is not to say that I accept the Senator's contention. I think it is a discussion for another occasion that there is necessarily some moral or cultural shift that must follow the enactment of legislation. It may be that there has been a moral and cultural shift that prefaces the legislation. It may be that there has been no moral or cultural shift but that it is simply a way in which people view living and dying in a world where we all live a lot longer than we used to and die in a manner that is very different from how we used to. It may all reflect other shifts in how we live and die in our modern lives rather than any sense of the value of death or the value of life. These are very complicated questions that may be for another day. I am here as a lawyer rather than as a philosopher. I would be more than happy to discuss that with the Senator on another occasion.