Professor David Albert Jones:

The current law should be thought of as a safeguard. The current law - the 1993 law, in particular - is a safeguard against the encouragement or assisting of suicide. Once that is taken away, other kinds of safeguards are not as safe and they do not guard in the same way. What happens is either that they gradually expand, or are not applied so much, or there are actions which are outside the law and increasingly tolerated. I encourage the committee to look not just at what the law says, but also at how it is actually put into practice in these other jurisdictions. We can look at places like Belgium. Out of 27,000 assisted deaths, I think there have been two referrals for prosecution, only one of which went to court. There is a further 50% of cases, which were never even reported. That 27,000 is therefore more like 50,000. In Ireland that would be approximately 15,000 deaths.