Welcome back, Karlin!
Techno-Culture says: Let the blogging begin … again. Nuff said.…
Author: Eoin
Dr Eoin O'Dell is a Fellow and Associate Professor of Law at Trinity College Dublin.
Advance Directives, Living Wills – Update
The Opinion of the Irish Council for Bioethics, entitled “Is it Time for Advanced Healthcare Directives?” is now available here (the thumbnail, left, is of its cover). It defines “an advance healthcare directive” as a “statement made by a competent adult relating to the type and extent of medical treatments he or she would or would not want to undergo in the future should he/she be unable to express consent or dissent at that time”. It sketches their development in practice and law in the US (from the 1950s) and internationally, and it points out that, in Ireland:
there is no specific legislation in relation to advance directives. The lack of legislation makes the status of advance directives unclear and, as a result, their implementation may or may not be enforced.
The Council noted that advance directives have “been recognised as an expression of an individual’s autonomy and as a useful tool in enabling the individual to maintain some level of control over medical treatment into the future, when he or she might lack the capacity to express autonomous preferences” and for such reasons recommeded providing for their enforceability as a matter of Irish law. The Council makes several practical recommendations as to the form of such directives, storing them, and revoking them.…
Advance Directives, Living Wills
According to media reports this morning (Irish Times | RTE), the Irish Council for Bioethics will today publish a report on the ethical and legal issues surrounding the structure, content and practicality of implementing advance directives or living wills. This is a very important development, much to be welcomed.
Advance directives or living wills are a statement of someone’s wishes and views regarding matters such as the forms of medical treatment to be administered or not, in circumstances where the person concerned is not in the future in a position to decide or communicate about such matters. They are prepared when the persons concerned are mentally capable to be used when they have lost the capacity to participate in the decision-making process.
The ICB’s call is a timely one. At present, in Irish law, the status of such advance directives or living wills is unclear (see Older People in Modern Ireland, pp 89, 130, 141, 151, 162). They are certainly one factor which decision-makers (such as a next-of-kin, medical personnel, and the courts) take into account, but there is in Ireland no equivalent of the UK’s Mental Capacity Act 2005, which from April 2007 will provide for the enforceability of advance directives.…
Independent Broadcasting
Irish broadcasting regulation is undergoing a significant change, what with the Department of Communications review of the Television Without Frontiers Directive as part of the EU Commission‘s proposals for a new Audio Visual Media Services Directive and the Department’s Digital Terrestrial Television trial and its attendant Broadcasting (Amendment) Bill, 2006 (see press releases: BCI; Department). A central plank of all of these changes is the Broadcasting Bill, 2006, and the audience at the Dublin Legal Workshop last week were treated to a discussion of its strengths and weaknesses by David McMunn (pictured above left) Director of Government, Regulatory and Legal Affairs for TV3.
Establishing a commercial broadcast sector in competition with RTE in Ireland must have seemed a slow process. …
Family Law Matters
The appointment of Dr Carol Coulter as Family Law Reporter was welcomed here last October. Today’s Irish Times (both on the front page and in a special report inside) reports that she has now produced her first report, under the title used in the title to this post. Thanks, Carol, for shining such important light on crucial, if heretofore opaque, aspects of our justice system.
This comes on the day when there is significant coverage of the government’s plans for a referendum on children’s rights (eg RTE (Mon (yesterday) | Tue (today) | Irish Times front page, inside | Irish Independent | Irish Examiner). As it happens, the School of Law, Trinity College Dublin, will tomorrow hold a conference on Children’s Rights and the Constitution.
Update (22 February 2007): My colleague Eoin Carlan has an excellent piece on the Government proposals in yesterday’s Irish Times; and there is coverage by Carl O’Brien of yesterday’s TCD conference in today’s Irish Times.
Update (27 February 2007): Dr Carol Coulter’s report Family Law Matters has now been published on the Courts Service website. It provoked an acerbic
Café Bars and the Privacy Bill
Q: What do these two things have in common?
A: They’re both in the news today for the same reason.
Two short quotes. The first one is from the list of motions for the Progressive Democrats‘ national conference today:
Motion 19
Conference calls for a review of the proposed privacy legislation in the Party’s General Election Manifesto in particular to avoid the dangers of muzzling the press through court injunction.
Dublin South EastMotion 20
Conference calls on Government to reactivate the proposal for café bars.
Dublin South East
The second is from a story on the RTE news website:
The PD conference in Wexford has voted overwhelmingly for the reactivation of party leader Michael McDowell’s café bar proposals. … The conference also voted in favour of a review of proposed Privacy legislation.
I’d say that the delegates from Dublin South East (the constituency of Michael McDowell, PD Party Leader, and Tánaiste (Deputy Prime Minister) and Minister for Justice) have set several cats among several pigeons with these motions. We’ll have to wait and see whether these policies make it into the forthcoming election manifesto (and any subsequent programme for government).
(Thanks to Daithà for tipping me off about this (offblog)).…
Won’t someone please think of the children?
It is a difficult skill to master, the ability to wrap serious depth in light witticism. Frank McNally’s Irishman’s Diary in the Irish Times has it in spades. And yesterday’s column is no exception. Lurking within the comedy is a very serious point about advertising to children. Every parent is aware of the pester power of children. A children’s tv channel advertises the latest must-have range of fanciful dolls or transforming superheros, and children everywhere pester their parents until the wretched things are bought. But it wasn’t always thus. Indeed, McNally began yesterday’s Diary with a trip down memory lane: it marked
the 50th anniversary of a fateful event in the history of broadcasting: the end of the so-called Toddlers’ Truce … a 60-minute suspension of all programmes every day between 6pm and 7pm, so that – wait for it – the children could be put to bed.
Wow! Children going to bed at teatime!! Do modern children go to bed at 6.00pm?! More seriously, though, McNally’s point, buried in the comedy, relates not to this golden hour but to its modern possible alternatives, such as banning or regulating advertising aimed at children, (and not to protect adults from children’s pester power, but to protect the children from the advertising):
…I used to have high hopes that the Swedes, who ban all ads to children under 12, would spread their enlightenment to the rest of the EU.
Anyone can get old …
… all you have to do is live long enough. This quote has been ascribed to Groucho Marx. Goverments too grow old. And when age creeps upon them, they make promises to secure re-election. Mary Harney, the Minister for Health and Children, and former leader of the Progressive Democrats (the PDs) (a small, right-of-centre, political party) has just called for an Ombusdman for Older People at that party’s annual conference in Wexford. She expects (expects? well, she should know!) that a commitment to introduce legislation to this effect in the first year of a new term in government will feature in the party’s forthcoming election manifesto. It is to be modelled on the office of the Ombudsman for Children, which was established by the Ombudsman for Children Act, 2002, and, according to Harney
will provide a focused, statutory office to be an advocate for older people, as well as providing a dedicated service for redress beyond existing organisations. This new office will be a new means to empower and respect older people accessing health and public services. …
It is one thing to establish the office. It is quite another to take it seriously. …
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