A GROUP which intends to campaign for a change in the law surrounding assisted suicide in Ireland has been established.
The goal of the Campaign for the Legalisation of Assisted Suicide is not just to allow Irish people who wish to avail of assisted suicide to travel to Switzerland where it is legal, but also to change the law in Ireland to bring about legal assisted suicide in the Republic.
Tom Curran, the co-ordinator of Exit International Ireland, an Irish group with about 120 members, which is part of a wider international assisted suicide information and advocacy organisation, is one of the three founding members.
Mr Curran, whose wife Marie has multiple sclerosis, has pledged to assist his wife in ending her own life should she take the decision to do so in future.
He said the purpose of the group was to campaign to “provide safeguards for people like myself, to allow partners or friends, not just to travel, but to assist them in taking their own lives within Ireland. Suicide has been legal in Ireland since 1993 so it’s quite legal for a person to take their own life,” he said.
“People with disabling terminal illnesses are deprived of the right to take their own life because their disability prevents them.”
However, Dr Regina McQuillan, a consultant in palliative medicine and spokeswoman of the Irish Association for Palliative Care, said changing the law to allow a person’s life to be ended with the assistance of another would “change society’s attitude to and relationship with people with disabilities or terminal illnesses”.
Dr McQuillan said that when someone takes their own life, it is seen as a great tragedy.
“For it to move from something which is seen as a tragedy to something which could be facilitated . . . would be to devalue the lives of people who are disabled or terminally ill”.
While she said she was very sympathetic to those who are disabled or terminally ill who find their situation intolerable she believes that “although an individual’s autonomy is important, it is not absolute because we are all a part of society”.
“Individuals have the protection of the law that they will not be killed,” Dr McQuillan said. “I would be particularly concerned that by normalising assisted suicide in the context of discontinuing suffering, it could devalue the life of the person who dies and other individuals in that situation.”
Figures released by Dignitas, the Swiss assisted suicide organisation, indicate that one Irish person took their own life with it last year.
This brings to seven the number of Irish people who are recorded as having taken their own lives at Dignitas since the organisation began offering assisted suicides in 1998.
A further 29 Irish people are listed as members of the organisation.
Last year two women, who were preparing to travel from the Republic to an assisted suicide
clinic in Switzerland, were intercepted by gardaí as they went to book their tickets in a travel agent.
Gardaí investigating the subsequent death of one of the women who died from an overdose in Dublin, said last month they would be sending a file to the Director of Public Prosecutions on the matter.
Under Irish law “aiding, abetting, counselling or procuring the suicide of another” carries a penalty of 14 years imprisonment and is an arrestable offence.
According to the Garda it “could happen that where a member of the Garda Síochána reasonably suspects that a person aided, abetted, counselled or procured the suicide of another, even if the person travelled abroad, the member could evoke their power of arrest and the arrested person could be detained” but added that this would have to happen with the consent of the DPP.