TDs and Senators have been warned of “grotesque examples of unnecessary deaths” resulting from legalised euthanasia.

Chief Executive of UK Humanists Against Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia Professor Kevin Yuill told the ‘Assisted Dying’ committee that in Canada “many” seek euthanasia “for problems of homelessness, poverty, and inadequate medical resources”, leading to “a growing number of grotesque examples of unnecessary deaths”.

Dr Thomas Finegan, Assistant Professor at the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at Mary Immaculate College said keeping the current law is the only “credible safeguard on offer against the normalisation of consensual killing in healthcare”. Dr Finegan is also on the board of The Iona Institute.

Dr Mark Komrad, a clinical psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins University of Maryland, described the practice as “neither good medical ethics, nor good public policy”, and said he hoped Ireland could learn from America’s “bad example”.

“PAS (physician assisted suicide) in the US is anathema to most physicians. The fact is, even among those doctors who endorse these procedures, very few are actually willing to provide them,” he said.

“Lethal prescribing tends to be done by a very few extremely zealous physicians who write scores of lethal scripts, for patients with whom they’ve had a relationship for only one or two days. Last year, one doctor in Oregon wrote 51 scripts.”