Lynn Ruane (Independent)
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I thank the witnesses for their presentations. Initially when I first read over the submissions, a lot of my questions were for the College of Psychiatrists of Ireland but Deputy Cullinane worked out some of those threads for me so I am not going to repeat his questions other than to pick up perhaps on one sentence in the submission. The witnesses do not even need to comment but I read it so that I can contradict what is there. It states: "Addressing these deficiencies is the necessary next step, not to enable ending the lives of terminally ill people as a way to avoid these challenges." I imagine that nobody in this room or who comes before the committee is looking for an easy way out and to not address challenges. As legislators and policymakers, many of us have been working for many years on all those areas of life and I would hate to think that anybody would be seen as wanting to introduce the option to end one's life as opposed to us continuing to do our jobs in regard to health and equity in terms of those psychosocial supports. I wanted to put that on the record.

My next point is for Professor Arensman and Dr. Griffin. I am going to imagine for a moment that the only way to protect a vulnerable person is not just the status quoand that the status quohas changed. I am going to look at the fact that we are talking then about how we protect vulnerable people. We may not all agree on whether the status quoshould change but let us imagine that scenario. It would not be ideal for us to leave a committee and think that it should or should not happen but to never discuss a scenario where it does happen without discussing what those safeguards could look like in practice. I say that without the witnesses saying they agree something should or should not happen. Let us just imagine that it does.

In a scenario where thestatus quohas changed, and we are looking at competency and the ability to consent and the distinct idea between someone choosing how they die rather than someone choosing to take their own life due maybe to their living conditions, fear, or all of those other things, could the witnesses contribute on what safeguards actually look like and how we begin to protect vulnerable people in a scenario where assisted dying does exist?