Dying with Dignity Bill 2020: Second Stage [Private Members] Dail Éireann — 2020-10-01 ============================================================ Róisín Shortall (SD), Dublin North-West I thank Sinn Féin for generously giving me some of its time. It is a pity we are under so much time pressure because I believe many people would like to contribute. It is an important issue. At the outset, I commend Deputy Gino Kenny on the work he has done in this area in bringing the Bill forward and allowing debate on this important issue in the Dáil this evening. We all accept this is an extremely complex ethical issue. It is sensitive and its complexity is all the more reason we should hear this debate tonight and that we should engage with this issue. I acknowledge at this point the outstanding work done by Tom Curran and his beloved late wife, Marie Fleming, in terms of bringing this issue, in particular, to the fore. They played a central role in that and I commend all their campaigning work. My party passed a motion at the party conference last year calling for clear policy in this area. We have just completed some policy work and I hope we can input that into the debate that will happen, hopefully, over the coming months. As a nation, we need to have an in-depth and nuanced conversation about end-of-life care. As we all recognise, this is an incredibly personal issue and it deserves a frank, honest conversation about the value of life, the complexity of terminal illness and the right to dignity and autonomy at the end of life. Of course, end-of-life care covers a whole spectrum. We are more familiar, of course, with home care, hospice care and palliative care and we have not been great about resourcing those properly. Successive Governments have not done that and it must be a critical part of end-of-life care. So too, however, are issues like a living will, the right to decide on resuscitation or not and, I believe, ultimately, the right in the case of a person who has a terminal illness to decide on the timing of his or her passing. I believe we all have a responsibility to respect those rights. An important contribution was made to the debate by Mr. Michael Nugent with regard to his late wife, Anne, to which the Minister referred. There was also an important contribution this week from Mr. Fintan O'Toole regarding his late father's death. In both cases, the point was made that the big fear of the person struggling with the terminal illness was that they would not be able to take that decision themselves. Once they were given an assurance, either on medication or support in accessing the carrying out of a decision with regard to ending their life, they relaxed about it. Once they were given that reassurance the anxiety went and, as it turned out, both people concerned had natural deaths. That is a fundamental right that I believe any of us would want for ourselves or for our loved ones. We cannot avoid this issue any longer. I commend Deputy Gino Kenny on his work. Ultimately a person with a terminal illness should be able to decide to choose the time of his or her passing and the State must respect that decision. This debate needs to take that frank look at the importance of personal choice and autonomy, and the importance of ensuring that medical treatment will be available when the person takes that decision. We need to include many issues in this. We need to take expert advice from a range of different people. We need to have a national conversation and debate. When the Joint Committee on Justice and Equality looked at the right to die, there was a recommendation for it to be referred to the citizens' assembly. While that has merit, taking it in committee, ideally a Dáil committee, which is established quickly and is time limited would be the best way to do it. The example is the Joint Committee on the Repeal of the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution. Wonderful work was done on that and it was broadly based. It was a respectful debate and came to a very clear consensus. We need to follow that in this case. --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2020-10-01/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:48:38+00:00 Sitting date: 2020-10-01