Mr. Tom Curran:

On the consequences, if the law is not brought in, things will stay the way they are. People will still travel to Switzerland, which is a difficulty for them, and in a lot of cases, because, as Mr. Ahern said, people may not be capable of organising themselves, they put other people in danger, including in danger of prison, and that puts an awful lot more stress on the person making the choice, like me - or people will continue to circumvent the law to provide that for them. Nobody wants to have to travel outside the country to die. There was a poll done with the Irish Hospice Foundation some years ago that found that more than 87% of people wanted to die in their own bed, in their own home. Unfortunately, that does not happen because people tend to get rushed to hospital and die in acute hospitals, which is not the best place to die either, but people want to die in their own home. As was said earlier, we have sanitised and medicalised death. Death is not a medical procedure. Death is part of life - it is the end of our life - but we have made it clinical.

We need to bring it back to the situation where this is about a person's life and about his or her choice. If we do not legislate on it, it will be like abortion, with illegal abortions, back-street abortions and people travelling outside the country for them. Is that what we want to continue?