REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE TO THE MEDICO LEGAL SOCIETY OF IRELAND
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE TO THE MEDICO LEGAL SOCIETY OF IRELAND THURSDAY, 28TH OF OCTOBER, 2010
Dia dhíbh, a chairde go léir. I would like to thank Dermot Manning for inviting Martin and I to join you for the 55th session of the Medico Legal Society. We are both very honoured by your decision to confer Honorary Life Membership of the Society on us. For years we have been a kind of an unregulated dental legal society of two and now we have gone legitimate.
When this society was formed in 1956 the idea of a formal joint discussion forum between the two great disciplines of law and medicine, was radical and farseeing, but no-one among the founders could have forseen the speed with which those two professions would become entwined or the complexity of the avalanche of issues they would be called to deal with jointly and separately. It was then a simpler time when there was relatively little civil malpractice litigation against the medical profession, when the health care system was still fairly rudimentary and only at the start of a massive expansion that raised standards, possibilities and expectations. Civil Legal Aid was then still decades away. There was no universal free second level education in Ireland - that was a full generation away and its impact when it arrived and when it launched more and more young people into third level education, was in the words of Seamus Heaney to unleash into Irish life “intelligences brightened and unmannerly as crowbars.” There began in the 1970’s the first real serious attempt to harvest and harness the brainpower of our people, the best, most potent natural resource we have. Professions like law and medicine grew exponentially in terms of numbers of practitioners, in the range of services offered and in the knowledge and skill base of both professions. Specialisms in both professions grew exponentially. Legal education and training came under huge pressure to absorb a massive array of European Law and new national law. Medical education and training came under huge pressure to absorb new scientific discoveries, new treatments, technologies, practices and procedures. All the while our society was and still is changing driven in part by ethical dilemmas whose parameters embraced both the medical and the legal spheres among others.
I doubt that the founders of the Medico-Legal Society, in the middle of the last century, could possibly have anticipated the extent of the information the general public would be able to access in the twenty-first century, or the level of oversight and accountability that would be demanded of medical and legal practitioners. Patients today have become better informed and newly empowered partners in their own healthcare. This has lead to changed expectations from both patients and their families, and this forum provides a valuable resource for medical practitioners dealing with the medical and ethical implications arising from these changes and the progress they advanced.
The famous mathematician Norbert Wiener made a very telling observation ‘Progress imposes not only new possibilities for the future but new restrictions.’ Complex debates have arisen and continue to arise over a range of issues where medical and legal considerations interact quite powerfully and where consensus around boundaries is not always crystal clear - things like advancements in life support techniques, organ donation, assisted reproductive technologies, stem cell treatments, reconstructive cosmetic surgery, therapeutic abortion, conscientious objection, patients rights to new or expensive or experimental treatments, the cultural sensitivities that should be observed in multicultural settings, the role of DNA based evidence, the line between acceptable risk and negligence, the role of women in both workplaces, the ethical vacuum improvident individualism has opened up–just to name a very few. These and many others areas bring lawyers and doctors into each others orbit and it is imperative that their realms are not so separate as to be mysteries to one another. We need points of intersection where each sphere can become intelligible to the other and where both can endeavour through dialogue to help our society deal with its dilemmas sensibly and soundly.
The Medico-Legal Society, with its regular meetings and discussions, its mutual invitation to the two professions to work together, learn together and learn from one another, is an important part of our society’s problem - solving infrastructure.
Both professions have experienced the cold winds of our new and unwelcome economic retrenchment. They each have had to cut their cloth to suit much tighter measure. They have been hit by reductions in resources, earning capacity and in manpower. Young lawyers and doctors have had to head overseas for job opportunities. The context we inhabit is completely at odds with the context we had anticipated just a few very short years ago. It calls for men and women of courage and determination who despite the mire of the moment are able to generate the momentum that will take us to a better future. Before we pack the bag for that future we have to know what to leave behind - what served us well and what did not, what will be of use and value to us in informing and shaping the future we are creating. Honest, heartfelt debate is at the heart of that preparatory process and this Society has been dedicated to that kind of debate for over fifty years.
I would like to conclude by congratulating you as you complete fifty-five years of coming together to talk, to share experiences and to debate on the many issues that our modern age is presenting us with. I hope your society will have many more years of fruitful discussion and I would thank you once again, on behalf of Martin and myself, for the honour you have bestowed on us today.
Go raibh míle maith agaibh.