THE FACT OF THE MATTER
BY PAUL HOPKINS
The Coalition’s Programme for Government is decidedly guarded on many proposals, with much use of the words ‘explore’ and ‘consider’ instead of ‘will’.
It is also deafeningly silent on some contentious matters. Such matters, however, aren’t going away any time soon.
The Joint Oireachtas Committee on Assisted Dying reported last year and supported assisted dying in certain restricted circumstances. A committee majority backed it but chairman Michael Healy-Rae, Fianna Fáil TD Robert Troy and Independent senator Rónán Mullen dissented. Last October, the Dáil voted 76 to 53 to accept the report after a free vote on what is a contentious subject.
Despite this, the Programme for Government has no mention of what the next step is with regard to assisted dying. And we really do so need to talk about it. Last year’s vote saw debate on both sides of any potential legislation to allow people with terminal illness – and in excruciating, permanent pain – have a right to choose to end their lives.
It seems, though, we’re caught between the rock and the hard place – with consent and the mental ability to consent by a terminally ill person to assisted dying.
If a patient is competent to decide, nobody other than that patient should have the authority to decide whether life is worth continuing.
The same argument, however, can be advanced against the current practice, prevalent in most countries, of prohibiting people from seeking assistance to end their lives.
Although some might decide that the suffering that marks their lives is not sufficient to make life not worth continuing, others would deem their condition unbearable.
And so the conundrum. Just as it would be wrong to entice people to ‘let go,’ it would be wrong to force people to endure conditions they deem unbearable.
There was a time on this island when we didn’t talk about cancer; a time when we didn’t talk about suicide; a time when we didn’t talk about our mental health; and a time when we did not talk about gender issues. Thank God, as a society we have grown up.
However, in a society where we are living longer thanks to medical science and better nutrition and hygiene, living longer can bring its downside in that ageing could still bring potential illness or just the old body and mind breaking down slowly, with its attendant pain and suffering.
We really need to talk about ageing, dying and death itself. Raging against the dying of the light, to borrow from the poet Dylan Thomas, serves no purpose at all.
Last year the conversation began, but the Programme for Government seems to have forgotten it’s in the in-basket.
The decision about whether to continue living in such debilitating conditions is among the most important we can make.
The right to life and the right to die are not two rights, but two aspects of the same right. The right to life is the right to decide whether one will or will not continue living. The right to die is the right to decide whether to die, when one could continue living. If the ‘Examining both sides of any potential legislation…
right to life were only a right to decide to continue living and did not also include a right to decide not to continue living, then it would be a ‘duty’ to live rather than a ‘right’ to life.
The idea that there is a duty to continue living, regardless of how bad life has become, is, sadly, an implausible one as I see it.
Any new law on assisted dying should be based on “reasonable medical judgment” that there is a high probability a person will die within a certain set time, according to Sinead Gibney, Chief Commissioner with the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission, responding to questions at last year’s meeting of the Oireachtas committee on assisted dying.
She said robust safeguards to protect the most vulnerable would need to be in place if any law allowing for assisted dying were introduced. These included people with disabilities, people with life-limiting illnesses, people who may be in relationships where coercive control is exerted, and older people.
We need to pick up the debate again. And it needs to be a careful and considered conversation. It’s a human rights issue. Ethically, we should have the right to control our own body and the State should not create laws that prevent those who wish to choose when and how they die from doing so.
With, hopefully, that last vestige of human kind, their dignity, intact.
