Warning of ‘killing pain by killing patients’

An Irish palliative care specialist has told the High Court he supports the total ban on assisted suicide here and believes it would be “entirely radical” for doctors “to try and kill pain by killing patients”.

Dr Tony O’Brien said the ban makes the situation clear for doctors and he feared its removal could result in vulnerable people opting to have their lives ended only so as not to be a burden on others. It was “quite impossible” to devise safeguards to protect such people.

A UK palliative care specialist, Prof Rob George, said offering the option of interfering in the dying process through assisted suicide “completely reclassifies the role of medicine” and “changes society fundamentally” as it involved reclassifying the intentional ending of a person’s life, at their request, as “a societally mandated good”.