She Should Not Have Been Alone
In 2021, a woman lay in a hospice bed in Ireland. She had lived with motor neurone disease for two years. She had been married for forty years. She had four grown children and five grandchildren.
She died alone.
Her husband, the solicitor Justin McKenna, wrote about her in the Irish Examiner this morning. "It was pandemic time," he says. The family was grateful she was "comfortable in palliative care". But it was not the death she would have wished, "or the way that we, as a family, would have wanted."
Read that slowly. What went wrong in that room?
She was not in pain. The hospice had done its work. What she lacked was her people. The door was shut by the rules of a pandemic, not by any law on dying.
Months earlier, he writes, she had begged to leave "at home in the company of her family". Most of us would want that. A familiar room, a hand to hold, voices we know.
Mr McKenna now argues for something else. He wants the law changed so that doctors can help people end their lives. He describes clients who talk about "one-way tickets to Zurich". End of Life Ireland holds a vigil outside the Dáil at noon today, and on Wednesday it brings a petition to Brussels.
His grief deserves respect. His conclusion deserves an honest answer.
The Oireachtas has already looked at this. In March 2024, a joint committee published 38 recommendations for assisted dying. Three members disagreed and wrote a minority report: Michael Healy-Rae, Robert Troy and Senator Rónán Mullen. In October 2024, the Dáil voted 76 to 53 only to "take note" of the report. That vote changed no law.
Since then, as Mr McKenna himself says, nothing has moved. He asks why.
One answer is that people have watched what happened elsewhere. Last month, a former Québec premier who helped bring in that province's euthanasia law said, "I'm not sure that I would have again voted for that law with the extension that we have seen in the recent years."
A law built for the hardest cases rarely stays there.
Think of the people who already feel like a burden. The widower who doesn't want to trouble his daughter. The woman with dementia who can no longer say what she wants. The disabled man who has been told all his life that his life is less. For them, a legal option can start to feel like a duty.
None of that makes the suffering of the dying any less real. It means the response has to be bigger than a prescription.
It means palliative care in every county, not only where there happens to be a hospice. It means home care hours so a woman can die in her own bed with her family around her, as Mr McKenna's wife wanted. It means no family is ever again kept outside a hospice door.
That is what she asked for. Not to be killed. To be at home, with the people she loved.
So here is the question for today. If we gave every dying person in Ireland what she asked for, company, comfort and home, how many would still be asking for Zurich?
The people outside the Dáil today are grieving, and they are sincere. But there is another voice in this story, and it is quiet. It belongs to the frail, the old and the disabled, people who will never hold a placard. They are not asking to die. They are asking whether we will stay.
We should.
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