The convicted murderer who helped an Irishman die by assisted suicide

A pro-euthanasia activist with three murder convictions has helped an Irish man struggling with mental health to secretly access assisted suicide in Switzerland.

On Tuesday, Emer Maguire told the Oireachtas Committee on Assisted Dying that her uncle Jay died by assisted suicide on the 26^th September this year, with the help of Sean Davison.

Davison is the UK director of Exit, a “right to die” group that believes that any mentally competent adult should be able to access assisted suicide for any reason. They are active in Ireland.

Davison was convicted in three distinct cases of premeditated murder in South Africa in 2019. In each instance, he assisted ill individuals who expressed a desire to end their lives, one of whom was his own mother. It was his sister who ultimately reported him to the authorities.

Struggling to hold back her tears, Mrs Maguire told the Committee that her uncle was in good physical health, though he suffered of mental health issues, and travelled on his own to Switzerland, where he was met by Davison. Davison had organised Jay’s application for assisted suicide in a clinic there and identified his body after the lethal procedure, according to the testimony presented to the Oireachtas.

The family members were unaware of their relative’s intentions, and they were informed by Davison only five days after Jay’s death and cremation.

“Those closer to him were aware that he was struggling with mental health and encouraged him to seek help. However, he managed to master most of this, with most of the people around him”, Emer Maguire told the Committee.

Only after his death, the family discovered that Jay was a member of Exit for fifteen years. This extreme organisation facilitates the suicide of competent adults. Their Irish connection is something worth exploring.

“Exit supports the Swiss model of assisted dying laws which are not based on strict medical criteria”, they say on their website. In other words, they campaign for assisted suicide being available not only to those who are terminally ill or suffer an incurable disease but to every adult who has mental capacity.

Exit has a branch in Ireland that is led by Tom Curran. Ten years ago Mr Curran’s wife, Marie Fleming, lost a famous “right-to-die” case.

Speaking on RTE’s ‘Claire Byrne Live’, two years ago Mr Curran said that he supported the “right” of a healthy woman to die by assisted suicide in Switzerland, because she did not want to continue living once her sick husband had died in the same way.

Last month he was invited to address the Oireachtas Committee on Assisted Dying, where he advocated for the Swiss model to be implemented here.

The founder of Exit International, Philip Nitschke, also known as “Dr Death”, held suicide workshops in Ireland in the past.

Dr Nitschke is also behind a suicide machine called “Sarco”, after sarcophagus, approved for use in Switzerland. The suicide pod releases nitrogen and kills in 10 minutes.

Sean Davison, who leads Exit UK, moved to England after having lost his medical licence to practice in New Zealand, because of his murder convictions. In 2019 he was sentenced eight years house arrest, five of which suspended.

This conviction happened while he was also the president of the World Federation of Right to Die Societies. This same organisation will have its next global conference here in Ireland next year, hosted by End of Life Ireland, the main group campaigning for the legalisation of euthanasia here.

Emer Maguire presented her uncle’s case to the Committee to highlight the shocking impact that assisted suicide has on families and friends, but this case also shows the malign presence of Exit in Ireland. This organisation and its extreme ideology have received no proper scrutiny by the media.

L'Oriente

Tutti abbiamo conosciuto, temo, qualche reduce dall'Oriente. Lo sguardo assorto, la dizione lenta, il sorriso allusivo, parlano con un distacco computo che ci fa dubitare, per la prima volta, del buddhismo. Se c'è un divario tra speculazione orientale e occidentale è che la prima si traduce in vita e la seconda in parole. Ed ecco che questi turisti del pensiero incarnano il tradimento delle dottrine che professano. Incerti tra una superiorità distratta e una indulgenza didattica, si rifugiano in una ironia che vorrebbe significare distanza e che esprime il contrario.

Eppure non c'è limite al peggio.
È su questo presentimento che la nozione di inferno continua a trovare credito sulla Terra.
E infatti una specie ancora più temibile è quella degli entusiasti, che cercano proseliti nello scompartimento di un treno o nell'anticamera di un dentista. Avessero assimilato che il desiderio è la radice del dolore e che il nirvana coincide con la sua estinzione, forse non desidererebbero tanto la resa altrui e la loro vittoria. Ma niente sa occultarsi quanto l'evidenza.

I piccioni viaggiatori

Giuseppe Pontiggia.

Rinascimento: quante banalità dure a morire

Arriva in libreria un saggio britannico annunciato da titoli, in inglese come in italiano, densi di luoghi comuni. Si tratta comunque – denunzie e demonizzazioni a parte – di un onesto trattato di storia italiana di facile e gradevole lettura.

Catherine Fletcher, Il libro nero del Rinascimento, Milano, Garzanti, 2022, pp. 466, euri 28,00.

Ti arriva sul tavolo un volume come questo ed ecco che t’invade la malinconia. Questo libro è stato salutato nientemeno che dal Sunday Times con le severe parole indirizzate ai lettori: “Se pensavate che il Rinascimento fosse solo bei quadri e riscoperta dei classici, vi sbagliavate di grosso”. E non dico l’illustre studioso, ma perfino il modesto travet della cultura media – l’insegnante, il recensore librario sui quotidiani – si chiede: ma come, siamo ancora a questo punto? Credevamo fosse chiaro che da circa due secoli i Gregorovius, i Michelet, i Burckhardt, sia pure svolgendo egregiamente il loro compito di scopritori e di divulgatori, avevano diffuso a proposito di quel lungo periodo della storia della civiltà e delle arti d’Europa, durato grosso modo dalla seconda metà del Tre a quella del Cinquecento, una massa immensa e inestricabile di pregiudizi e di luoghi comuni. Li abbiamo contrastati per lunghi decenni: abbiamo studiato i due lunghi periodi di crisi climatica, demografica, socioeconomica da concentrazione della ricchezza e da una spaventosa sperequazione, abbiamo rivelato i retroscena politici e le messinscene mediatiche sottostanti alla meravigliosa avventura del “mecenatismo”, non abbiamo certo taciuto le guerre, i colpi di stato, le congiure. E abbiamo anche corretto molti, troppi “luoghi comuni”.
Machiavelli non fu mai un apologeta del crimine voluto e prezzolato da un tiranno; e la virtuosa Lucrezia Borgia duchessa di Ferrara non fu affatto un’avvelenatrice.
Macché. Niente da fare. “Invidïosi veri”, direbbe il Padre Dante, come al solito predicando al vento. Gli occhiuti e sovente assoldati custodi del conformismo bignamesco non demordono. E hanno dalla loro due potenti alleati: anzitutto la pigrizia di molti insegnanti e di molti “addetti ai lavori” o sedice nti tali ai quali l’aggiornamento pesa; quindi il dogmatismo ottuso di troppi “operatori mediatici” pronti a smascherare qualunque forma di “revisionismo”, come dicono loro. Guai a sostenere che il “luminoso” Rinascimento non fu né sempre né dappertutto tale e che il “buio” medioevo non è mai esistito: non ci sono né fonti né studi, né argomenti che tengano. Vero è tuttavia che qua e là certe cose si rimettono in discussione: magari, anche lì, a costo di ulteriori malintesi.
Prendete il grosso libro di Catherine Fletcher, brava studiosa della Manchester Metropolitan University e collaboratrice della Bbc, la quale – esplicitamente rivolta ai suoi studenti, ai quali esso è dedicato – ha scritto un saggio dal titolo The beauty and the terror: an alternative history of the Italian Renaissance. Ebbene: alternative history  in che senso, e a che cosa? Con ogni evidenza, a una tradizione troppo “aurea”, o “rosata”, del Rinascimento italiano sereno scrigno di bellezza, almeno secondo una certa visione soprattutto angloamericana che fa scuola dai tempi di Burckhardt e che continua a riversare sulle nostre città e i nostri lidi – il che, tuttavia, è lontano dal farci dispiacere – legioni di turisti che annualmente invadono le strade e le piazze di Venezia o di Firenze, per quanto ameremmo fossero un po’ più educati e un po’ meno parsimoniosi. Ma l’editore italiano ha trovato il titolo inglese, tutto sommato, molto poco impressionante nella nostra lingua e dalle nostre parti. Noi, alla bellezza mischiata al terrore ci siamo tutto sommato piuttosto abituati. Semmai, una parvenza di “provocazione” in più poteva pervenire – si è pensato – dall’espressione “Libro Nero”, c he richiama alcuni, numerosi pamphlets politici specie antifascisti, anticomunisti e antiamericani. Anche il nostro caro, vecchio Umberto Eco (che ci manca molto) aveva collezionato esempi rinascimentali con i quali puntellare la tesi da lui esposta in un saggio, Il fascismo eterno (edizioni La Nave di Teseo), che onestamente non è tra le sue cose più brillanti.
E di storie rinascimentali “nere”, a onor del vero, ce ne sono molte: il che nulla toglie, va da sé, all’eccezionalità artistica e intellettuale di quel periodo. Ciò detto, bisogna notare che il contenuto del libro forse non rende intera giustizia al titolo italiano, mentre quello inglese a modo suo resta più adatto a descrivere la ricchezza dell’arte rinascimentale in rapporto al cinismo e sovente alla spietatezza con la quale alcuni potenti si facevano committenti d’arte per appoggiare il loro regime per mezzo di una sapiente rete di terrore, di complicità e di consenso. Questi potrebbero essere i tre key-word che dominano un libro ben costruito, denso di eventi accuratamente, anche se sinteticamente, narrati, che si apre su un quadro dell’Europa del Quattrocento per poi parlare delle corti, delle guerre, del Nuovo Mondo, della Riforma e Controriforma, delle guerre di religione, del pericolo turco. Un onesto tracciato storico di storia italiana che riesce di facile e gradevole lettura.
Franco Cardini

Make euthanasia available to dementia patients committee told

Patients with dementia should be offered euthanasia or assisted suicide, the Oireachtas Committee on ‘assisted dying’ has been told.

The Committee heard from representatives from End of Life Ireland that “assisted dying” should be introduced not only for terminally ill patients but also for those with neurodegenerative conditions such as dementia, who could be years away from death.

The general public can be easily confused by the expression “assisted dying”, but for those campaigners it clearly means not only assisting those who are dying soon but also a direct intervention to procure or facilitate death, if requested.

Ms Janie Lazar, chairperson of the organisation, told the Committee in heropening statement said that “assisted dying” should be offered even when death is not foreseeable: “We’re asking you as legislators, to honour a person who has a terminal or life limiting diagnosis. Because time alone, ‘foreseeable death’ ought not be the sole basis for calculating eligibility criteria; some neurodegenerative conditions can go on for years as we see with Dementia, with MS.”

Notably, none of the pro-euthanasia committee members objected. This is significant. They say they want the law in Ireland to be restricted to those supposedly within six months of death, but when people come before them demanding euthanasia and assisted suicide on much broader grounds than that, they have nothing to say. Their silence speakers volumes.

When asked to elaborate on euthanasia for dementia patients, another representative of End of Life, Mr Justin McKenna (pictured), said that patients can write an advanced healthcare directive and “in the context of dementia, I see the circumstances of the patient being relevant. The quality of the life of the person will have diminished to a point that is clinically intolerable within the grounds of that person’s determination and where there is no prospect of that quality improving by natural means.”

Notably, the TD who asked Mr McKenna to elaborate, Emer Higgins of Fine Gael, raised no objection to his line of reasoning.

Mr McKenna emphasised the distinction between ‘lifespan’ and ‘health span’.  “They are not the same”, he said. “You can live with dementia for a very long time. We in this room will all know people who are in that condition and who could sustain a life, or perhaps an existence. However, is it healthy? Is it healthy in the way they would like it to be? In a previous time, when they had capacity and when they were able to determine what they regarded as quality, they should be allowed to maintain it and decide when it should end, if that quality no longer exists.”

This distinction between ‘lifespan’ and ‘health span’ has potentially huge implications. It appears to mean that a person should be offered euthanasia not when their life is nearly over, but when their health is nearly spent, whatever that may mean. If so, euthanasia would be available on very wide grounds indeed.

If patients with dementia can request euthanasia through advanced healthcare directives, this would entail killing them when someone judges they being mentally incapacitated, without a final explicit consent.

This proposal aligns with recent developments in Belgium and the Netherlands, where eligibility criteria for euthanasia have expanded to include psychiatric and neurodegenerative conditions. In Belgium, last year there were 21 cases of euthanasia for cognitive disorders, including dementia and Alzheimer’s, as well as 21 cases for psychiatric conditions.

In the Netherlands, the number of euthanasia deaths based on dementia increased by 34pc last year. According to the official report there were 288 cases of euthanasia for dementia and 115 for psychiatric conditions.

Some weeks ago, Theo Boer, a Dutch professor of healthcare ethics and former member of the Review Committee on Euthanasia, told the Oireachtas Committee: “I am convinced that it is only a matter of time before we take the next hurdle: allowing children of dementia patients to request euthanasia for their demented parents.”

In reply to End of Life Ireland shocking proposals, Senator Ronan Mullen spoke about his father’s illness: “I lived with and helped to care for my own father at home for approximately ten years during the time in which he suffered from Alzheimer’s. I can say that we did not let him miss out on anything he needed in order to deal with any pain, including sedation. I can also say that while he would have hated the way in which he became extremely dependent on us for the most basic necessities of life that enabled a climate of love and care in our family that I never could have imagined being possible. Regardless of what letter anybody might have written in the past about how they would like to be dealt with in the future if they should lose capacity, there is more to the story. There is the story of how the relationship with that person can continue.”

A climate of care and love is what patients with neurodegenerative conditions need. Euthanasia is not care and is not love.