Dr. Eric Kelleher:

The membership of the college comprises 1,200 people but for the consultant psychiatrists, the figure is somewhere around 700. The draft paper was formulated and brought back to the council, which approved it. We then had a soft launch, as they say, at our winter conference in 2021. There were many opportunities for feedback through email and at the conference. We then formally launched the position paper at the end of 2021. Between the initial submission to the justice committee on the Dying with Dignity Bill to the time of the launch the paper, it was approximately a year in formulation.