Mr. Justin McKenna:

Mervyn Taylor, of course, who brought it in at that time. He was somebody for whom I had a lot of respect. It changed the way I did my work as we then had some structure. In other words, instead of just listening to people giving me instructions concerning their wills, I could talk to them a bit more about what they should do to prepare for their end by appointing attorneys. In the course of the years after 1996, I must have written hundreds of enduring powers, but it really was only half the story and it was not until afterwards and Ireland's ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, UNCRPD, that we needed to move up a notch. The Assisted Decision-Making (Capacity) Act, though passed in 2015, could not be implemented because we did not have the resources or the means, and it took eight years to put those in place.

My answer to the Deputy's question is that we have those structures now. There is an infrastructure in place for people like me, as practitioners, to oversee the undertaking by candidates for end-of-life care to sign off on advance directives in a manner that makes it clear that they know what they are doing, they have been informed and they have correctly communicated that information.