David QuinnMaking suicide more acceptable is the wrong signal to send young people, writes David Quinn
Gay Byrne is the voice of middle Ireland moving in a more liberal direction. It has always been so. All down through the decades, Byrne, who is not ideological but intuitive, would use his various shows to nudge Ireland towards the liberal Promised Land.
From the point of view of the more ideologically-minded liberals, he was perfect. Middle Ireland found him very reassuring, especially women. He would not frighten the horses. Even when those who might frighten the horses – a strident feminist, say – appeared on his show, he had the ability to keep the ‘horses’ from becoming too skittish.
His particular skill was the ‘human interest’ interview. More than anything else it was this that led Ireland out of its ‘captivity’ to the traditionalist mindset and helped it to see that things would be far better, much freer, in the Promised Land that beckoned.
And so he would interview women trapped in miserable marriages or couples who were good, Mass-going Catholics but who couldn’t understand why the law banned contraception.
RTÉ has, of course, been at this kind of thing for years, but Byrne was the past-master at it.
Misery
These human interest stories of misery in traditionalist, conservative, Catholic Ireland, were often very true and needed to be told of course.
But we never got to hear, and still never get to hear, the misery that can be inflicted on people by the norms of liberal societies.
Thus, we don’t hear interviews with children whose lives were made a misery when their parents divorced. Or with the men whose wives kicked them out of the family home and reduced them to seeing their own children every second weekend.
Or with the women forced into having an abortion by boyfriends who had no intention of becoming fathers, or the parents who didn’t want to become grandparents yet, or the women who regret their abortions.
Anyway, this is all by way of commenting on Gay Byrne’s latest news-making comments, namely that he would consider suicide if he was dying and in great pain.
He accepted that he has been told by those who know about such things that pain today can be managed. But still, he would like the option of dying a little earlier than nature or God might permit. He would like to make a ‘rational’ choice.
That, of course, is the language of euthanasia advocates. They speak always of the ‘right’ to make a ‘rational’ decision about when to die.
This is why it wasn’t a bit surprising to find Byrne’s attitude to suicide being praised by Tom Curran, the Irish representative of Exit International which campaigns for euthanasia, including so-called ‘assisted suicide’.
Exit International doesn’t seek ‘merely’ the right to die when someone is in pain and is terminally ill, but the ‘right to die’ when you have decided you want.
This country, or our media at least, is now completely contradictory about suicide.
We praised young Donal Walsh as he battled bravely against cancer. He was in pain but he soldiered on regardless and said life is always worth living, no matter what.
Euthanasia advocates would say ‘good for him’, living on was his choice. But that choice shouldn’t be ‘imposed’ on everyone in his situation.
However, Walsh insisted that life was a good in itself, not simply good for him.
As we praise the courage of a Donal Walsh, we also deplore the high rate of suicide in Ireland, especially among young men. But then we turn around and say we support ‘assisted suicide’. If the polls are to be believed, a majority of us support it.
How do we square deploring suicide on the one hand, and supporting assisted suicide on the other?
Perhaps it’s because we haven’t thought enough about it and are simply reacting emotionally.
Choice
But in other cases maybe we think that a young man who commits suicide isn’t really making a choice. He is reacting to life’s pressures and, if they were relieved, everything would be okay.
On the other hand, sick and dying persons are simply prolonging the inevitable and therefore it would make more sense to help them kill themselves.
So maybe what we’re really saying is that sometimes suicide is good, and sometimes it’s bad. It just depends.
But notice what is happening here. We are now sending out a very mixed message to society about suicide that is very difficult to control. Once we say suicide is sometimes acceptable, we increase its acceptability, and then the grounds of acceptability will keep on increasing.
This is what has happened in countries like Belgium and the Netherlands. Belgium has just passed a law allowing children who are sick and dying to be killed if they ask. That would cover someone like Donal Walsh who, while not a child as such, was a legal minor.
In Belgium, people who are not sick and dying can also avail of euthanasia. A person whose ‘sex change’ operation went wrong asked to be killed and was killed.
Twins who were deaf and were going blind asked to be killed and they were killed.
What is happening is that a new norm is being created around death, dying and suicide.
We are making suicide more normal and more acceptable, and the signal that sends to people who are psychologically vulnerable is absolutely disastrous.
Gay Byrne should really have thought longer and harder before speaking out in the way he did. It was a terrible thing to say in a society that is already struggling with the blight that is suicide.