Assisted suicide should be legal in certain cases, 49% of farmers believe

Almost half of all farmers believe assisted suicide should be legal in certain circumstances.

In a finding from the Irish Examiner/ICMSA farming opinion poll which indicates broad views on the issue, 49% of respondents agreed while 31% disagreed. Women and younger farmers are more likely to back the idea.

The percentage of people in favour is actually down 3% compared with the result in 2015 when the same question was asked. However, while three years ago 36% were opposed to the idea, this time around that has fallen to 31%. There is a corresponding increase in the number of people who neither agreed nor disagreed (19%).

More women (55%) than men (48%) were in favour, and support was also strongest among younger and middle-aged farmers, averaging at around 52%, before supports levels dropped to 45% for those aged over 55.

There were also considerable geographical differences — while 77% of respondents in Tullow and 69% at Iverk Show agreed, just 30% in Dualla in Tipperary said they were in favour of the idea.

Figures provided by Dignitas, the Swiss-based right-to-die nonprofit member society, showed that eight people from Ireland have used its accompanied suicide services, although no-one has done so since 2013. As of last year, the organisation had 37 Irish members.

According to a spokesperson: “Dignitas’ aim is not that people from all over the world travel to Switzerland, but rather that other countries adapt their legal system to implement end-of-life-issues so that citizens have a real choice. The core goal of Dignitas is that Dignitas one day does not exist anymore — because people can have their will at home and don’t need an association like Dignitas.”

William Reville, emeritus professor of biochemistry at UCC, who has written about the issue of assisted suicide, said permitting it in certain circumstances could prove “a slippery slope”.

If the proposition were simply ‘Assisted suicide should be permitted in Ireland’, I predict that less than 49% would agree. ‘In certain circumstances’ invites one to imagine a terminally ill patient in unbearable and medically unrelievable agony, whose only hope of relief is death. To decide to deny the only available means of relief in such circumstances would be extremely difficult for anyone. However, although I am not an expert, I understand that palliative care medicine can relieve/manage most, perhaps almost all, pain.

“Relieving unbearable agony at the end of life by euthanasia, agony that cannot be otherwise relieved, is the commonest argument for introducing assisted suicide. And, on the face of it, this is not unreasonable. However, the problem with this argument, in my opinion, is the ‘slippery slope’, that is, once introduced, the criteria for allowing assisted suicide broaden to cover a growing range of circumstances of lesser impact than unbearable suffering in the terminally ill, e.g. psychological suffering arising out of being at odds with life. Experience elsewhere bears this out.

Many people have a philosophical/religious persuasion that it is always unethical to deliberately end a human life. This position was so widely held in the past that it alone effectively ruled out any introduction of assisted suicide.

However, he said times are changing and “there is now a strong general public impetus to introduce more and more liberal changes.

“And despite the caveat I outlined above, this current Behaviour and Attitudes farmers’ poll is another illustration of these changing times.”