Emer Higgins (Dublin Mid West, Fine Gael)
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I thank our guests for being with us today and sharing their expertise on a particularly complex area of potential legislation. Following on from the previous contribution, we are ten years on from the Marie Fleming case and neither society nor this Legislature has faced up to this issue yet. I want to legislate for assisted dying in a way which ensures that we introduce and legally enforce safeguards and parameters that protect people. The problem, as we have discussed today, is that those safeguards and parameters could be overturned over time. We have teased that out in a legal sense thanks to the contributions of Senator Seery Kearney and others. The reality is that we do not have a crystal ball. We cannot accurately project the societal trajectory or the culture at a different point. We cannot pre-empt the conclusions the Legislature or the Judiciary will draw in the future. However, the good news is that it is not our job to do that. It is our job to legislate for the here and now based on current and previous experience, and to future-proof legislation as best we can with a view to always protecting our citizens. We can do that in the comfort of knowing that we operate in a functioning democracy and that our future parliamentarians will be democratically elected and accountable to their electorate as we all are here today. We will be judged on whether we introduce legislation or not and, if we do, on whether we introduce adequate and appropriate safeguards.

I thank all the witnesses for their opening statements.

I really liked what Professor Huxtable said about looking at enshrining in law the right to palliative care. That would be a significant step for us to take as a society and an important message. I fully agree with everything he said on the right to conscientious objection. I was quite struck by what Mr. Kelly said about being able to reaffirm the right to die without conferring a duty to live. That eloquently sums up where we are at. I would be interested to hear more about the criterion of eligibility of intolerable pain that will result in death. When Dr. Andrea Mulligan was with us - I hope I interpreted her correctly - she seemed to be saying that the most legally straightforward way of introducing this would be for only the terminally ill. I would be quite interested to hear all three guests' perspectives on that.

We have heard a lot of debate about incrementalisation. The reality is we have seen dramatic increases, sometimes tenfold, in assisted dying over a short period of years where it was introduced in other countries. Of course, we have to be cognisant of that. Dr. Mills provided us with a list of safeguards, which I think are great for us for us to bear in mind, even as a work plan. Having sat on the health committee recently in respect of abortion, I am conscious that medical oversight comes with huge workload demands for medical practitioners. We need to look at that. Ultimately, on the criterion of terminally ill versus the inclusion of intolerable pain which leads to death, what are the legal ramifications? How do we define intolerable pain in legal terms?

If we have time, I would also be interested to hear about how we protect people who are now incapacitated but may have already signalled when they had capacity. I am quite concerned about that too.