Assisted suicide - Issues can be dodged for only so long

The Supreme Court has provisionally fixed February 19 to hear the appeal by Marie Fleming, a terminally ill woman, against the High Court’s rejection of her challenge to our constitutional ban on assisted suicide.

The early date for the appeal is welcome but tempered by the fact that, once again, our courts are ruling on issues properly — and ultimately — the responsibility of the legislature.

It is natural that rulings, limits and very precise interpretations be applied by the courts to laws enacted by the Oireachtas. Nevertheless, it would be far more honest of us — and our legislators — if our parliament made laws for the world we live and die in rather than play pass-the-parcel with the courts over profound and divisive issues like assisted suicide or abortion.

This is especially true as the issue, whatever it is and no matter how long it’s been dodged, eventually returns to the Oireachtas, just as the abortion impasse has.

Politicians of all hues have, for three decades, avoided being painted into a corner on abortion. Taoiseach Enda Kenny, and most of his cabinet colleagues, may not have longed for the opportunity to be the ones finally obliged to find a solution to the dilemma but it seems this coalition is left with little alternative but to do so. It would, however, ignore the lessons of history to be emphatic, to rule out the possibility that this may become the eighth Dáil to leave the issue to their successors. That would be worse than shameful.

There has not been the same passionate campaigning, at least as yet, around assisted suicide as there has been around abortion but many of the dilemmas are the same. They centre on the rights of individuals to manage their lives or, if you are of a different viewpoint, what is described as the sanctity of life.

For many people today of, say, retirement age the possibility of a long, lingering death, one stripped of dignity and independence by dementia or one of the awful diseases that eat away at physical capabilities is a genuine fear, a fear made even more real by spectacular medical advances. Many will have watched parents or even older friends or relatives, sustained by medical innovations, fight the inevitable for far longer than was imaginable even a lifetime ago. For many medical advances mean months or even years lived in the half-light of dependence on others or drugs or more likely both. Very many people, just as those who would ask not to be resuscitated in certain circumstances, would prefer not to endure such an ordeal at the closing days of life. Surely that is their entitlement.

Principles honoured in the European Convention on Human Rights led to the ruling in the A, B and C v Ireland ruling over abortion. It is hard to see how those same principles will not lead to a similar conclusion on assisted suicide. This, unfortunately, means our politicians may be tempted to play pass-the-parcel for 30 years on assisted suicide too.