April 27, 2015

Gotta Love the Irish

Gail O’Rorke arriving at Court

In a court case that has caused many to wonder about the state of the Irish nation, Dublin taxi-driver, Gail O’Rorke has recently seen her life played out in Ireland’s criminal courts.

Her crime?

To try to help her good friend and MS sufferer, Bernadette Forde, travel to Dignitas in Zurich for an assisted suicide.

Yet the whole plan come unstuck when a travel agent by the name of Rathgar Travel reported Gail to the police when she went to purchase tickets for the pair to make the 1.5 hour flight.

The prosecution told the court that it made no difference that the police foiled the plan and the trip to Switzerland never took place. Rather, in the eyes of the law it was what Gail allegedly did, as a good friend understandably would do, to help her friend that was the crime.

In reply the defence SC, Dermott McGuinness, said to the court

‘Did you ever think that you could go into a travel agents and book a flight and try and get the tickets and wind up on the wrong end of an indictment? Could you believe that?’

The answer is clearly no.

When the jury went out for their verdict on Monday 27 April, Gail O’Rorke had supporters of voluntary euthanasia/ assisted suicide watching carefully, and not just in Ireland.

A guilty verdict would have set an important precedent.

While not directly applicable to Ireland, a guilty verdict would have left the UK DPP’s Assisted Suicide Guidelines in tatters.

This is because, on almost every count, there was never any public interest in prosecuting Gail O’Rorke in the first place.

Was her status as a minority beneficiary in her friend’s will enough to have a jury believe that she ‘did it for the money’?

Or should her ignorance of the peculiar twist on the law have brought her down?

After all, Gail admitted to not realising that buying a one way plane ticket to Zurich so that her close friend could have the peaceful, lawful death that she so wanted was an offence?

Well blow me down, neither would most of us. And this is the point.

In most countries, in spite of assisted suicide being unlawful in the majority of places, no State authority has dared to go after the friends and family of a dying person; friends and family who ‘do the right thing’.

Who support their loved one in their quest for a peaceful, lawful end.

Not the Irish!

Assisted dying seems to be the Catholic Church’s last bastion of control.

The Church lost abortion when, in 2013, Ireland’s Parliament finally passed the Protection of Life During Pregnancy Act 2013 which allows terminations under strict conditions.

And the Church looks like losing the 22 May 2015 referendum on gay marriage too.

That leaves dying with dignity as their last battleground.

And it shows the Catholic Church as continuing to look away. It leaves their cruel and inhumane treatment of the sickest in society; those whose vulnerability through illness makes them unable to fight for their right to die when and how they choose.

The charges which the court ordered on Friday 24 April to be dropped were:

1. the procurement via the Internet of Nembutal from Mexico; the drug which Bernadette took to die; and

2. Gail’s help in organising Bernadette’s funeral prior to the time of her death – an instance of attempting to procure her suicide.

Were the stakes not so high, the past week of court room antics would have been laughable.

In a majority (note not unanimous verdict) the jury delivered the right and proper one verdict. ‘Not Guilty’. But what an awful and scandalous waste of Irish tax payers dollars. Surely the State can do better.

Dr Philip Nitschke

29 April 2015

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