THE HEAD OF the organisation representing Irish psychiatrists has said she is against the recommendations made by an Oireachtas committee to introduce euthanasia in Ireland.

Professor Siobhan McHale, speaking on RTE Radio this lunchtime, said that rather than introduce assisted dying there should be an improvement in palliative care for people facing terminal illnesses. 

McHale said she has dealt with patients who are facing a terminal diagnosis and said she believes people want a death and the current situation in inadequate care in Ireland is causing people to examine the possibility of change in the law. 

“The experience that I hear of people talking about their loved ones, perhaps having to come into Emergency Departments and lying on beds. The last days of life, people being left in intractable pain.

“These are the scenarios where people don’t have the advocacy and support and which inevitably leads to a call for something to change.

“We do believe that something needs to change, but not that the change needs to be ending our patients’ lives because we can’t provide them with good enough care,” she said. 

McHale said that there are calls for improvements in palliative care.

“Bringing in a palliative care strategy that needs to be published and updated, needing to bring in the mental health care supports for people at the end of life but also for their carers is a huge dearth and a huge level of distress for carers in trying to care for their end of life and family members in the absence of appropriate supports,” she added. 

This week an Oireachtas Committee report “on assisted dying” has recommended that the government introduce legislation allowing the practice, but not without a long list of conditions. 

The recommendations come after a reportedly fraught end to nine months of debate and expert testimony, which included division among committee members. A minority report from two dissenting members on the 14-person committee is expected to be published at 4 pm today. 

Those dissenting members are Cathaoirleach and independent TD Michael Healy Rae and independent Senator Rónán Mullen. 

Notably, the committee has not recommended that people be permitted to include assisted dying in their advanced healthcare directives, which detail a patient’s wishes regarding treatment in the event they cannot take the decision themselves.

An updated palliative care strategy from the Department of Health was also recommended and the committee said that palliative care and assisted dying should operate “completely separately and independently of each other”.

The committee also advised that funding for public awareness about palliative care be increased. 

People inquiring about assisted dying after a terminal diagnosis should be presented with the alternative of end-of-life care, the report said. 

McHale said she had concerns in regard to recommendations psychiatrists being left to assess a patient’s mental capacity to choose to end their lives. 

“The heart of our training as psychiatrists and the heart of what we’re working with in in Ireland is a strong focus on suicide prevention.

“This very much undermines that strong focus assisted dying is a term in a blanket term that covers two terms, assisted suicide and euthanasia, the ending of a person’s life a person choosing to end their life because they cannot see any other solution goes against the very heart of what we’re trained to do as psychiatrists, which is to work alongside people and to support them in finding other solutions,” she added.