Marie Louise O'Donnell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister of State. I also thank my colleague, Senator David Norris, for seconding the motion and Senators Jillian van Turnhout and Mary Ann O'Brien who were part of the Taoiseach's cabal for speaking to the motion. I thank the Government for withdrawing its amendment which I appreciate more than it knows. It was brave, perceptive and good to do.

About one year ago I was doing some work in my capacity as a broadcaster and a writer when I met a man who was facing his last days. He was living in a very tough and treeless estate located somewhere outside Mullingar. He ached for breath as I sat beside him in the privacy of his own home. When he turned to me and said "You cannot get off this planet alive, Marie-Louise," I knew that death, dying, end-of-life issues and bereavement had a lot more to do with things other than health. That was at the core of what I tried to say earlier.

The motion is not about health. While it of course comes from the genius of the eclectic and electrifying people who gave of their expertise to the Joint Committee on Health and Children - which of course would be the platform for this proposed review - out of that come issues on finance, legality and all the matters I included in the motion, including the educational, cultural and legal aspects of our living lives. This is because the living have to do with the dead and dying and the dead have an awful lot to do with the living. Moreover, it is never someone else's business. One cannot present it to the palliative care or health providers and tell them it is their business. It is the business of people in all walks of life, including Senator Crown's remarks on the education of doctors, the education of young people and in respect of culture, finance, law and all parts of society.

I ask that the State learn from the brilliant initiatives that it created itself, as well as those created nationwide in the various different community-led solutions. I ask that the full panoply of State services be examined and that the Government begins to bring them together, both what is done brilliantly and what is not, to weave them all from a thread to good practice and support into our common humanity. I ask the Government to set up a facility whereby this can be done. While Members need be part of it, I believe there is a place in which this can be done and in which all these strands may be brought together. This should be done in order that people in Ireland can, as the Taoiseach stated, learn to live well, that is, to be born well, to live well and to grow old but also to die well, as they have lived.

I wish to comment on a most interesting remark on bereavement made by a member of the public at the national conference organised in October 2013 by the Forum on End of Life. She explained that because her husband had died well, she and her children could live well and grieve well. What happens before death can dictate what happens after death. I wish to expand this issue beyond the confines of health to all of our living lives. This was the point of the motion and I thank my colleagues for their support. I thank all Members of the House for their support because a motion such as this comes from a good place. It does not come from a political place but is above politics. Members brought a great deal of their own experience, as well as much agreement, to what I was trying to suggest to the Government. I hope Deputy Kathleen Lynch, who I consider to be a fine, articulate, compassionate and perceptive Minister of State, might bring to the Cabinet the idea of bringing this together and might examine its possibility in the future.