Assisted suicide bill to ‘safeguard the vulnerable’

Right to die campaigner Tom Curran says a soon-to-be introduced Dáil bill allowing assisted suicide will be about safeguarding vulnerable people.

Independent Waterford TD John Halligan is to introduce a dying with dignity bill that will remove any criminal sanctions against a family member or doctor who assists a suicide.

In the Supreme Court in 2013, Mr Curran’s late partner Marie Fleming unsuccessfully challenged the law banning assisted suicide.

Both Mr Curran and Gail O’Rorke, who was recently found not guilty of helping her friend, Bernadette Forde, to end her life, have helped in the wording of the private members’ bill.

If the bill was to become law, an assisted suicide could take place, but only when a person had a terminal and incurable illness.

Hope Ireland, a new organisation opposed to legalising assisted suicide and euthanasia, warned that the consequences of doing so in Ireland would be catastrophic.

At the group’s inaugural conference in the RDS in Dublin, director and disability rights campaigner Kevin Fitzpatrick said it was impossible to include safeguards in legislation to cover every aspect of human nature and behaviour.

“Laws which permit other people to give suicide assistance are dangerous. The consequence of legalising euthanasia/assisted suicide has been catastrophic in other countries,” he said.

On RTÉ radio yesterday, Mr Curran said he accepted there were inherent dangers in legalising assisted suicide and that most of the bill was about protecting vulnerable people. However, he said it was lubricious and insulting to suggest that people caring for their loved ones would want to kill them if assisted suicide was legalised.

“There will be a small number of people that will take advantage of anything and it is those people that we have to capture in the legislation,” he said.

He said the intervention would only apply to a small number of people who were already making the decision to end their lives.

“In the last two weeks I have been contracted by three people who want to meet me because they want to put their own plans in place,” he said.

“Just because there are a small number of people who want to avail of this does not mean that there are other people who will be pressurised into making decisions.”

Mr Curran insisted that the bill was not about euthanasia because it was the individual who was deciding to end their life, not someone else.

“Euthanasia is when somebody else makes the decision,” he said.