Assisted dying regulations 'should be decided by the Oireachtas' rather than courts, Dáil hears

The joint Oireachtas committee on assisted dying heard submissions from experts in the area on Tuesday. Picture: Maxwells

The regulation of assisted dying should be decided by the Oireachtas rather than the courts, a Dáil committee has heard.

The Oireachtas committee on assisted dying heard submissions on Tuesday around developing a legal framework to allow for assisted dying to be carried out in Ireland.

Professor Deirdre Madden of the School of Law in University College Cork (UCC) told the committee that “law must take precedence” over ethics.

“We need to avoid a philosophical pass-the-parcel, with law passing the buck to ethics, and ethics handing it back again.

“In a democratic society, law must take precedence for many reasons,” Prof Madden said.

In particular, Prof Madden said that ethics does not have structures or procedures for detailed examinations of difficult and controversial questions.

She added that the Oireachtas is better at “taking societal temperatures” than the courts system.

“Medical ethics has a role and a voice along with all these other perspectives, but it should not be determinative of public policy in this area,” Prof Madden said.

Professor Mary Donnelly, also from the School of Law at UCC, told the committee that it would be better for laws on assisted dying to be formulated by the Dáil rather than through a case taken through the courts system.

However, she said it would be “impossible” for the Dáil to set out the entire framework but could instead establish the “high-level” aspect.

Prof Donnelly also spoke of the potential safeguards and standards for any potential legislation, saying that assisted dying laws in other countries have requirements for “informed consent”.

However, there was some dissent, with Professor David Albert Jones, Director of the Anscombe Bioethics Centre in Oxford saying that the legal framework for assisted dying is already in place as it is illegal.

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“Those countries that have introduced assisted dying in some form have abandoned a principle of healthcare ethics that is as old as the Hippocratic Oath and effectively have accepted that some lives are unworthy of life, which undermines the very foundations of an egalitarian civilised society,” Prof Jones said.

Prof Jones questioned the impact of any such safeguards, saying that in other countries they can be changed following the implementation of assisted dying legislation.

Questioned by Fianna Fáil TD John Lahart about the potential for pressure to be placed on people for assisted dying to be carried out, Ms Donnelly said that it was possible but expected safeguards to be put in place.However, she said that there would be concerns for “more subtle kinds of pressure”, where someone would be made to feel that their life was worthless.

To combat this, Ms Donnelly said that there needed to be adequate access to palliative care.