Professor William Binchy:

I ask the Senator to remind me of his direct question. Of course one can make distinctions. One can make distinctions in cases where there is a projection of six months of life remaining. One can make distinctions in respect of incurable conditions and conditions from which a patient may get better. One can absolutely make those distinctions. The question is whether the making of those distinctions has logical force. The reason I mention logic is that if something has a logic to it, the logic will out. That is the point. One cannot resist logic. One might wish to resist it but one cannot do so. If the logic is that an individual choice to die is to be supported in circumstances where a person is incurably and terminally ill, one will move to incurably ill.

I will, if I may, make a wider point about the human condition. Before we are born and when we are born, we are absolutely defenceless and dependent on the support of other people. During most people's live, if they are fortunate, they have a period of independence when they are physically and mentally well and do not depend directly on others. When they are children, they depend on their parents but during their adult years, if things go right, they will go through a period of independence. As they get older, they will move into dependency mode. In those circumstances, they will have conditions that are incurable and will not get better. Undoubtedly they will lose their capacity to see and hear. They will lose various faculties. Committee members will remember the description of a person's life in "The Seven Ages of Man". In that period, people will start to become more dependent on others. There is the insight of society over generations, and I try to stress this point and I know I have made it two or three times now. We are talking about the accumulated wisdom of societies. That means people who have been in intimate relationships and family relationships over generations and millennia. The insight is that we should care for each other. The purpose of legislation is to produce laws that are truly caring. Such legislation does not introduce a law with logic in it that means it will extend outwards. What we are hearing today is negotiation by advocates for change. They are telling us where they, as negotiators, will draw the line. We cannot negotiate with the logic that underlies the impact of the change that is made. We know that from the experience of other countries. To say that we are distinct and it will be different here is, I am afraid to say, a process of negotiation and trying to engineer an outcome.