Time for legislative clarity on consent to medical treatment: children, young people and the “mature minor”

Despite recent calls for legislative change in the area, the law in relation to consent to medical treatment for those under the age of 18 in Ireland remains unfortunately, and perhaps dangerously, murky. This article proposes to analyse the law in relation to three categories of “children”, looking first at proxy consent for young children, secondly at consent for those aged 16 and 17, and finally at the possibility of a Gillick-type consent process in this jurisdiction, that is, consent for sufficiently mature under-16s. We will ultimately argue that, rather than addressing this issue on a piecemeal basis through various pieces of legislation, the time has come for a single Act which definitively provides for statutory clarity in this area.