Lynn Ruane (Independent)
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I thank the witnesses for their presentations. My first question is for Professor Jones. I found the phrase "have accepted that some lives are unworthy of life" that Senator O'Loughlin picked up on to be quite problematic. It is quite stigmatising to people who have had to face difficult decisions. I am not a practising Catholic but nor would I consider myself to be an atheist as I have some quite spiritual beliefs. When I think of that phrase, I think of my father when he spoke to me about not wanting to live if he did not have his mind. If there had been a regulated system in Ireland, the reason we would have supported him in fulfilling that wish is because his life was so worthy to us; the complete opposite.

I refer to making a value claim that somehow, life in its existence is just for its existence, regardless of the suffering that somebody may be enduring at the end or that somehow, to make a decision to end that suffering is some sort of way of saying that person's life is not worthy. That is a very difficult decision for an individual and a family to make and they make it out of a sense of love and respect and respecting that person's autonomy and wishes. This brings me to ask how we come up with these ideas of what worth is. What is value? How do we decide that insisting that someone stays alive is what gives their life value or worth? Does Professor Jones's submission - it is completely okay if it does - comes down more to the idea of an objective truth for him in that God gives life and God takes it away and that all the conversations that we have around that do not really fit, because of the objective truth? For me it is about subjective psychological states in terms of how we perceive what our dignity is, what our worth is or even, as Professor Jones said, internal burden. I wonder whether our belief systems, whether they be religious, moral, ethical or just environmental given our circumstances, are all subjective psychological states rather than universal truths and that for some reason there is a universal truth that someone must stay alive for their life to be of value.