Ms Petra Conroy:

We are here not to propose, in my case, Catholic doctrine onto the State. Everybody in this room is trying together to see what the common good is. We have made many points, such as I believe I was made by God. However, you do not have to be a person of faith to understand and value human life. This can be seen from the pre-Christian Hippocratic oath, from the post-Christian World Medical Association and from most medical ethics associations in the world. The following is not a faith thing either: if I say I want to take my own life and then later on, when I am old and incapacitated, I say I want to take my own life, the two responses are completely different. People can evaluate that from any perspective; it does not require a faith perspective. My faith feeds into it but those things are - no more than the preferential option for the poor with Brother Kevin because it is coming from his Catholic faith - values shared by society. There is the issue of equality, and what I do will have an effect. If I decide from my autonomy that I want to end my own life, that has effects.

For instance, I can think of a story, and in these situations one has to think of one's own loved ones. My father died a few years ago. He was in great health all of his life and he found it very hard to find himself with cancer at the end of his days. There were two very different situations. His oncologist really was looking out for him. He knew he was an older man and he was not going to live forever but he was always about a programme of treatment without suggesting anything radical. That really empowered my father. Then, in one ancillary element, he got another side effect. He was in another unit that obviously only saw him as an old man at the end of his life. They were not concerned about his nutrition. This was in a hospital in Ireland, and there was an attitude of constantly bringing up do not resuscitate, DNR, in a very inappropriate way. It was a very different attitude, and nothing we could say changed the attitude. There is that view of putting somebody into a category where they have less dignity because they have certain conditions. That is not a religious situation; I would think that is an equality situation.