Mary Seery Kearney (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

We are talking about a very specific situation where the advance healthcare directive is silent. One would imagine that the law as it stands at the moment should be the presumption. I think that is what Senator Mullen is arguing. I have to say that I have sympathy with his position and it is s a really valid argument, rather than us putting the burden in the opposite direction. By reversing that the onus is on a family to make an application to comply with where the law currently stands, when the woman in question does not have capacity, is running contrary to the status quo in the country and what people voted on when they voted in the referendum. To reverse that onus and place it on a family to have to make an application not to terminate or not to have a consequence of termination, I note we have clear situations, where medical intervention is required, that it is not considered termination. The Senator, to be fair, is not disputing that. We seem to be going a step further than is necessary. In family law, we have situations where solicitors, before they issue proceedings for divorce or judicial separation, have a statutory obligation to confirm that mediation, counselling and everything like that has been tried. It would not be without precedent to put in an obligation in the creation of an advance healthcare directive to do exactly what Senator Doherty has suggested and to put in an obligation that a woman is obliged to have a paragraph about this and that anyone who is signing off on a healthcare directive has a duty to make a statutory declaration that the matter was addressed.