It is not written to hurt and infuriate. It is written to challenge a coercive consensus of recent years in Ireland. That coercive consensus, which now defines what may and may not be said about suicide, has four essential pillars.

The first is that suicide is always a tragedy. The second is that it is a double tragedy when it involves a young person. The third is that the act of taking one's life is always preventable. The fourth is that it is the responsibility of society to prevent it.

I do not accept any of these positions. The overwhelming majority of suicides undoubtedly are tragedies. A suicide can be a blow to a family from which it never recovers. A suicide can damage people outside the family, indeed outside the circle of people who even knew the dead man or woman. I have listened to an Iarnrod Eireann locomotive driver re-live the horror of seeing a lone figure, standing on a wooden sleeper between the rails, facing the oncoming train, the driver knowing that, no matter what he did, the train could not stop in time to prevent disaster, watching as the figure shaped itself into an individual, hoping the individual would have second thoughts, knowing that they would not. The trauma of serving as the involuntary instrument of another's death is ineradicable.

However, for many suicides, the tragedy is what happens to them before death, not the act of selfdestruction . . . or of self-liberation . . .itself. We have no accurate measure of the number of older people who choose to end their lives, although we know it to be large. Many of those older people, prior to dying, experience the tragedy of faculty-diminution, observed by war correspondent Martha Gellhorn in herself at 86.

"I have no grasp of time and no control over my memory, " she wrote. "I cannot order it to deliver.

Unexpectedly, it flings up pictures, disconnected with no before or after. It makes me feel a fool. What is the use in having lived so long, travelled so widely, listened and looked so hard, if in the end you don't know what you know?"

Not long afterwards, Gellhorn organised her own death with the same determination she had brought to her life and career. She made a will and wrote loving letters to accompany some of the bequests. She left notes to neighbours, alerting them to her death and apologising for the inconvenience caused. She showered, changed into a clean nightdress, took a favourite book, swallowed a lethal dose of sleeping pills, and drifted into oblivion. The ex-husband whose life had overshadowed her own . . . Ernest Hemingway . . . was long dead. Her adopted son was long estranged from her. Most of the lives once closely interwoven with her own had ended.

According to biographer Caroline Moorhead, Gellhorn had always maintained that suicide, done in one's own time, achieved neatly and efficiently, was a gift and a right vouchsafed those for whom life had become unliveable.

"Why stay until the evil present becomes a worse future and eats away all the value of the past?" she had asked, decades before her death.

George Sanders, the actor once married to Zsa Zsa Gabor, stated the neutral nature of his own suicide even more succinctly. "I have lived enough, " he said in his tranquil final note.

Empathetic people project their own sensibilities onto every suicide, whereas, in at least some cases, the act may patently demonstrate a total empathydeficit on the part of the dead person. When Sylvia Plath turned on the gas in her kitchen cooker and lay down with her head at the open door of the oven to die, she may not, by her action, have planned to damn her husband Ted Hughes to life-long popular blame, although, given the toxic nature of their relationship and her sporadic grasp on sanity, it is at least possible this was her motivation.

What is certain, however, is that she was not thinking about the dangers to her little children, asleep one floor above the seeping gas. Plath suffered profound empathy deficit.

In Canon Sheehan's novel Lisheen, a character reproves an unsuccessful suicide by stressing the connectedness of humanity.

"You cannot go out of life alone, " the would-be suicide is told.

Meaning: if you kill yourself, you kill part of those who love you.

That (admirably) empathic view ignores the reality that some people can go out of life alone.

Virtually every week, in every newspaper in every big city in the western world, a brief reference can be found to a loner found dead in a tiny flat or under a bridge, unremembered, unmourned.

The connections of life, in some families, stay strong and flexible no matter what challenges are offered by passing time and changing circumstance. In other families, they fray and fragment to the point that a former family member can go out of life alone, and may wish to exercise whatever little control remains to them by choosing their own time, place and method of departure.

While the pressures of life, alcohol, drug-taking . . . and, in the case of immigrants, isolation and loneliness . . . may currently render disproportionate the numbers of young suicides in Ireland, historians have noted that the Warsaw Ghetto response to Nazi oppression divided along generational lines. Older people hoped for survival. The young, "whose hands and feet were not bound by family ties", preferred honour to life, seeking out "the most dignified, most honorable death".

History slides its attention away from those young suicides, preferring to concentrate on the more appealing image of Warsaw Jews rising, broken bricks in hand, to die fighting. Just as, today, we slide away from the notion that suicide might ever be the expression of a right, vindication of a need, or solution to a problem.

Instead, society willingly absorbs a facile, ineffectual, nonspecific blame.