Anthony McIntyre thinks the case for assisted dying in Ireland is now more pressing than ever before.

Before ending her own life last October Belgian athlete Marieke Vervoort had suffered from an incurable spinal degenerative disease, the onset of which occurred 19 years earlier.

Prior to the Rio Olympics she had planned to take her life immediately after the games, anticipating that by then she would have achieved her last wish and there was little purpose continuing with a life that had been deprived of enjoyment and meaning, a consequence of the unbearable pain she had been enduring.

Everybody sees me laugh with my gold medal, but no one sees the dark side … I suffer greatly, sometimes sleeping only ten minutes a night - and still go for the gold. Rio is my last wish.

She extended her life for another two years beyond the anticipated exit point of 2017.

Confined to a wheelchair but not paralysed by fear or trepidation, her decision was a calculated and reasoned one. A woman determined to exercise the maximum amount of autonomy over her own body, she pursued the course to its ultimate destination.

The BBC presenter Eleanor Oldroyd wrote that “I hope and pray that, when the end came, it was a soft and beautiful death, as she wished.”

Which if obtainable is how death should be.

Fortunately for Marieke Vervoort, Belgium - unlike Ireland where the laws are amongst the most restrictive in Europe - officially permits assisted dying or physician-assisted suicide, as it is also known.  It has been legal since 2002, and in 2015 it was estimated that each day on average five of the country’s citizens availed of the facility.

According to the lawyer, Gilles Genicot, who is co-Chairman of the Euthanasia Control and Evaluation Commission, responsible for managing the practice in Belgium.

The law humanizes – the deaths of terminally ill patients, on the one hand, and on the other hand, for patients who are not terminally ill but who are completely hopeless, there is a respect to the individual autonomy. I think it's a major advance in the way society, law and – philosophy see this very important issue.

One of the physicians who assisted patients to die, Marc Van Hoey, described the process:


I start with a narcotic drug, in a higher dose, to create a deep sleep. And later on we give barbiturate in a shot. If you use an intravenous injection and do it good, the patient is dead in one or two minutes.


Much of the opposition to assisted dying comes from clerical bodies unable to resist the urge to have their religious opinion intrude into the lives of other people, so often to their detriment. The Vicent Lambert case in France dragged on agonisingly for a decade before Lambert was eased out of a life as pointless as it was painful. There, the parents of Lambert fought a court battle against his wife and siblings. The parents thought they had the right to inflict their religious opinion on their son and in doing so received endorsement from the Pope who tweeted:
We pray for those who live with severe illness. Let us always safeguard life, God's gift, from its beginning until its natural end. Let us not give in to a throwaway culture.

Thoughts and prayers and little else. We sort of know how that works.



Shortly before he availed of the services of a Swiss clinic the Italian DJ Fabiano Antoniani sent a message: "Finally I am in Switzerland and, unfortunately, I got here on my own and not with the help of my country." Which seems to be an enormous abdication of responsibility by a government to its citizens. In Italy the Church preferred Antoniani, blinded and rendered tetraplegic after a car accident, die a prolonged unpleasant death rather than allow him the right to choose to end his suffering on his own terms, not that of the clerics.

The Belgian experience has not been without it problems and earlier this year three doctors went on trial charged with the murder of Tina Nys although they were subsequently acquitted.

From I first started thinking about the matter I have been a supporter of assisted dying, and I hope that William Reville is right is his prediction that:

The next big debate in Ireland will probably be about whether assisted suicide should be legally available to incurably ill patients who are suffering great distress.

In our own society, by pushing back the repressive hand of the clerics, huge strides have meen made in terms of advancing women’s reproductive rights and hauling the existence of gay people out of the dark age of John Charles McQuade. However, it is appalling that Ireland exports the end of life issue to Switzerland. Physician assisted suicide is something that should have been legislated for already given that there is evidence of majoirty support for its introduction. This is all the more pressing at a time when a chronically underfunded health service has too few ICU beds to inspire confidence in its ability to deal with the Covid-19 pandemic once it peaks. 

The availability of a humane assisted dying programme would have been reassuring to many people who currently live in trepidation that in the event of them not being afforded intensive care, and facing certain of death, they would undergo the equivalent of death by waterboarding. Consent is imperative in such matters but final days and hours spent gagging for breath, being slowly tortured to death is something I very much do not consent to.

⏩Follow on Twitter @AnthonyMcIntyre

Humane Assisted Dying, Not Waterboarding

Anthony McIntyre thinks the case for assisted dying in Ireland is now more pressing than ever before.

Before ending her own life last October Belgian athlete Marieke Vervoort had suffered from an incurable spinal degenerative disease, the onset of which occurred 19 years earlier.

Prior to the Rio Olympics she had planned to take her life immediately after the games, anticipating that by then she would have achieved her last wish and there was little purpose continuing with a life that had been deprived of enjoyment and meaning, a consequence of the unbearable pain she had been enduring.

Everybody sees me laugh with my gold medal, but no one sees the dark side … I suffer greatly, sometimes sleeping only ten minutes a night - and still go for the gold. Rio is my last wish.

She extended her life for another two years beyond the anticipated exit point of 2017.

Confined to a wheelchair but not paralysed by fear or trepidation, her decision was a calculated and reasoned one. A woman determined to exercise the maximum amount of autonomy over her own body, she pursued the course to its ultimate destination.

The BBC presenter Eleanor Oldroyd wrote that “I hope and pray that, when the end came, it was a soft and beautiful death, as she wished.”

Which if obtainable is how death should be.

Fortunately for Marieke Vervoort, Belgium - unlike Ireland where the laws are amongst the most restrictive in Europe - officially permits assisted dying or physician-assisted suicide, as it is also known.  It has been legal since 2002, and in 2015 it was estimated that each day on average five of the country’s citizens availed of the facility.

According to the lawyer, Gilles Genicot, who is co-Chairman of the Euthanasia Control and Evaluation Commission, responsible for managing the practice in Belgium.

The law humanizes – the deaths of terminally ill patients, on the one hand, and on the other hand, for patients who are not terminally ill but who are completely hopeless, there is a respect to the individual autonomy. I think it's a major advance in the way society, law and – philosophy see this very important issue.

One of the physicians who assisted patients to die, Marc Van Hoey, described the process:


I start with a narcotic drug, in a higher dose, to create a deep sleep. And later on we give barbiturate in a shot. If you use an intravenous injection and do it good, the patient is dead in one or two minutes.


Much of the opposition to assisted dying comes from clerical bodies unable to resist the urge to have their religious opinion intrude into the lives of other people, so often to their detriment. The Vicent Lambert case in France dragged on agonisingly for a decade before Lambert was eased out of a life as pointless as it was painful. There, the parents of Lambert fought a court battle against his wife and siblings. The parents thought they had the right to inflict their religious opinion on their son and in doing so received endorsement from the Pope who tweeted:
We pray for those who live with severe illness. Let us always safeguard life, God's gift, from its beginning until its natural end. Let us not give in to a throwaway culture.

Thoughts and prayers and little else. We sort of know how that works.



Shortly before he availed of the services of a Swiss clinic the Italian DJ Fabiano Antoniani sent a message: "Finally I am in Switzerland and, unfortunately, I got here on my own and not with the help of my country." Which seems to be an enormous abdication of responsibility by a government to its citizens. In Italy the Church preferred Antoniani, blinded and rendered tetraplegic after a car accident, die a prolonged unpleasant death rather than allow him the right to choose to end his suffering on his own terms, not that of the clerics.

The Belgian experience has not been without it problems and earlier this year three doctors went on trial charged with the murder of Tina Nys although they were subsequently acquitted.

From I first started thinking about the matter I have been a supporter of assisted dying, and I hope that William Reville is right is his prediction that:

The next big debate in Ireland will probably be about whether assisted suicide should be legally available to incurably ill patients who are suffering great distress.

In our own society, by pushing back the repressive hand of the clerics, huge strides have meen made in terms of advancing women’s reproductive rights and hauling the existence of gay people out of the dark age of John Charles McQuade. However, it is appalling that Ireland exports the end of life issue to Switzerland. Physician assisted suicide is something that should have been legislated for already given that there is evidence of majoirty support for its introduction. This is all the more pressing at a time when a chronically underfunded health service has too few ICU beds to inspire confidence in its ability to deal with the Covid-19 pandemic once it peaks. 

The availability of a humane assisted dying programme would have been reassuring to many people who currently live in trepidation that in the event of them not being afforded intensive care, and facing certain of death, they would undergo the equivalent of death by waterboarding. Consent is imperative in such matters but final days and hours spent gagging for breath, being slowly tortured to death is something I very much do not consent to.

⏩Follow on Twitter @AnthonyMcIntyre

10 comments:

  1. The bottom line for me in this debate is that every human being with the agency and autonomy to decide has the right based on property in one's person (from which the right to bodily integrity to determine the ending of their life if their pain is so much for them that life has ceased to have any meaning for them. Likewise, based on these human rights principles everyone has the right to management of their own death.

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    Replies
    1. I would subscribe to that view - it should be a human right. If the pope chooeses to die in agony, his choice. But spare me a similar fate. I don't need to agonise because of his religious opinion.

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  2. Kevin Hester says

    Tony I suggest you interview Philip Nitschke from Exit International on this subject.

    My family lost a sister/mother/wife to motor neurone disease. Her final moments were a slow strangulation.

    Our problem in Ireland is the patriarchal catholic church. They are torturing victims and their families imho.

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    Replies
    1. Kevin - a wholly gratuitous circumstance. Death by slow strangulation sounds like the type of death penalty administered by Franco: garrotting.

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  3. We don't let dogs suffer but we do let humans suffer.

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  4. So a teenage girl can kill herself due to PTSD etc caused by abuse but we can't kill the rapist? Ok so no more tears for suicide victims then? Says a lot about us.

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  5. Well consider piece AM.
    I tend to agree with Dr David Goodall, the 104 year old scientist who travelled from Australia to Switzerland in 2018 to end his own life;

    “Everyone over middle age should have the right unquestioned to end their lives as and when they choose.”

    Having worked in a voluntary capacity with young people at risk I would though have to see several hoops put in place before the more immature could be facilitated in such a way.
    Thankfully all the younger people I supported were either able to turn things around or at least muddle through. I did however work with two middle aged men who suicided and for whose choices I had sympathy and understanding. It would have been much more humane had they been afforded greater control of their destinies.

    The lead up to passing legislation will be divisive but with the right safeguards built into proposals it will I hope be carried.

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    Replies
    1. Henry Joy - there are more people who think they have easy answers than there are easy answers. I think it should be treated like a plane - let it fly but make sure every precaution is in place before it leaves the runway. I had read the Goodall experience while writing the piece and have not come to a settled view yet on his approach.
      My own position is pretty straightforward - where the decision is rational, observe laissez faire. Where it appears irrational intervene.
      Far from perfect but as we both agree, perfection is the enemy of good.

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  6. Having witnessed a relative descend into incurable illness, I would be very much in favour of such a law that would allow people to die with dignity. There is nothing more sobering than witnessing someone being unable to hold a pen or cup.

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