Terry Prone: More of us support assisted dying — but still we have no discussion

Marie Flemings died naturally 10 years ago, after a long fight against the ban on assisted suicide. Picture: Sam Boal/RollingNews.ie

Jackie Kennedy had cancer, when cancer was almost always fatal. A paparazzo captured a shot of herself and her partner, Maurice Templesman, in Central Park. She was always thin, but now she was skeletal, swamped in a camel coat, a headscarf loosely fastened at her neck. She could have been anybody. Anybody sick and frail.

She was admitted to hospital for more tests, then released. Maybe a day later, she died, surrounded, according to the media of the time, by her family. Drinking coffee with my mother that week, I marvelled at the grim good fortune that had allowed her to leave the hospital which had confirmed they were fresh out of treatment options for her, and co-incidentally die a day or so later.

My mother held the coffee cup at her lip and raised an eyebrow through its steam. I did a “What?” “You cannot seriously believe,” my mother said, “that Jacqueline Kennedy just happened to peacefully die surrounded by her family, having just been released by the hospital?” That was, of course, exactly what I believed, until my mother crisply told me that the rich and privileged do not die roaring. Only the poor, she said, choke to death or meet the grim reaper exhausted by screams of pain.

Jackie Kennedy went home with a Brompton cocktail in her handbag, gathered her loved ones around her, told them how much she loved them, listened to their soft comfortings, took the famous morphine mixture, and drifted off, her thin-boned hands held warmly by those of her children.

My mother was a traditional Catholic, as was Jacqueline Kennedy, and Catholicism regards taking your own life as a mortal sin. Indeed, I suspect that when her demise happened, some Catholic countries held to the old belief that suicides should not be buried in consecrated ground. Yet she had quietly come to a view that when the alternative is agony or grievous diminution, taking your own life was your right. The idea that suffering in some way ennobles was a Christian view she no longer believed in.

Views have shifted

Over a couple of decades, the people of Ireland shifted their views on the matter of controlling the end of your own life. It may have been contemporaneous with the decline in the power of the Church, but that was not causative of the change. Believing Catholics, like my mother, quietly decided against the regnant dogma, and the regnant dogma shriveled away.

But it left, like a beached whale, the problem facing those who aren’t rich and — more importantly — aren’t physically able to end their own lives when they have decided, in the words of actor George Sanders, that they have lived enough. The problem is that what is a universal right of the able-bodied is withdrawn from the physically disabled.

If you cannot swallow, for example, there’s no point in having (as did George Sanders) enough barbiturates to do the job, because you are physically incapable of taking them.

You may be surrounded by a loving family who have been persuaded to help you, but you cannot avail of that help, because if they assisted you, those family members, under the current law, could be charged with murder.

The wonderful Marie Fleming who died (naturally) 10 years ago, fought this ban on assisted suicide. She was grievously hampered in her movements by multiple sclerosis, with which she had suffered for 25 years and had decided that she wanted to be able to leave life at a time of her own choosing.

Vicky Phelan has publicly supported the Dying with Dignity Bill.

But she would need help to do achieve a peaceful, dignified death and she didn’t want to endanger her partner or anyone else who might provide that assistance. The law told her no, so she fought the law. Right up to the Supreme Court, she fought the law. The law won. And, 10 years later, nothing has changed.

Well, that’s not quite true. The consensus around assisted dying has grown.

In October 2021, a Sunday Times poll found 71% of people are in favour of legalising assisted dying, while just 12% said they would support a prosecution. A separate poll in December last year found 74% were in favour.

This figure has been achieved without a heavily funded campaign. As is evidenced by the rudimentary simplicity of the website owned by End of Life Ireland. That organisation, run by volunteers, plans a photo opportunity outside Dáil Éireann.

“Too many people who are dying endure an unnecessarily, prolonged death, which is inhumane and cruel,” says End of Life Ireland. “International evidence, expertise and experience is available for our legislators to draw on which shows an assisted death is a kinder death for those who want this valid end of life option.”

Back in 2020, TD Gino Kenny drew up the Dying with Dignity Bill which was publicly supported by Vicky Phelan. It failed on technicalities. The recommendation from the Justice Committee was that an Oireachtas Special Committee — an all-party organisation that would serve for around nine months — be set up to move this forward.

That was back in 2021. Many months have passed since then. Months during which Irish citizens experiencing a range of life-diminishing illnesses and conditions faced a form of death that terrified them — and some of them were ushered helplessly into that death. But no Oireachtas Special Committee has been established.

The issue sits precisely where it sat more than a year ago. “This is the conversation Ireland is ready for,” an activist told me this week. “But our TDs are not, it seems.”

Why no conversation?

Now riddle me this. If you know the overwhelming majority of your constituents are on side with the basic concept of assisted dying, why would you, as a politician, not want the matter discussed?

Let’s assume you might be concerned that some of your constituents would uphold the “slippery slope” approach to the issue, whereby they would be fearful that legal euthanasia (as those constituents would see it) would open the floodgates to abuse or put the country on a slippery slope to murder of the elderly or of people with intellectual disabilities or illnesses.

But if that is what’s slowing you down, why on earth would you not want the setting up of an Oireachtas Special Committee, which could ensure that if Gino Kenny’s latest rendition of his Dying with Dignity Bill becomes law, it would be, in the words of AA Gill, “caveated up to the gills”?

It makes no sense, given that three other Dáil committees addressing three other issues have been set up in the interim. Of course, TDs are busy. They’re always busy, and we’re in an imperfect storm of social and economic chaos, right now, which makes them even busier.

“Advocacy, as we all know is not for the faint-hearted,” my activist friend sighed this week. Fortunately, the End-of-Life advocates aren’t faint-hearted.

Here’s hoping the photo opportunity leads to a shake-up in the busy inertia among our legislators.