Joe Higgins (Dublin West, Socialist Party)

The Minister does not persuade with her arguments. I said earlier that the idea of anybody wishing to stay on working should be embraced. A certain cohort of people take that option and it is the best for them but it should be voluntary at the age when people should have a free decision on whether they wish to continue to work in paid employment or retire and take a pension. In the past year approximately 11,000 people would have gone on to transition payments. That was their decision but this is a slap in the fact to the approximately 11,000 people who will be denied that choice when they reach the age of 65 beginning in January 2014.

The argument is used throughout the European Union and repeated by the Minister that people living longer means that workers should work longer, in other words, work until they drop. The reality is that if this brutal measure, projecting forward to when people would have to work until they were 67 or 68, were enacted and continued to be enacted, thousands of people will die before they reach the retirement age of 68. That is a brutalisation of society by any standards. It is a perverse policy.

A pension is a portion of the wealth created in society that is committed to people who have finished their working lives. This is the crux of the problem. Is society capable of creating sufficient wealth to meet the needs of everybody? That could be the case if production was organised for the benefit of society and if the distribution of that wealth was just and equal. However, therein lies the problem with European capitalism currently and the fact that tens of millions of workers in Europe are either unemployed or underemployed and are denied an opportunity of creating the wealth that could go to creating a better society, including keeping people in a happy and comfortable position in retirement.

Even in this country it relates to the way the wealth is distributed. There is huge inequality in wealth distribution in our society which this Government is reinforcing rather than tackling. It is reinforcing it further by bringing in reactionary and regressive measures such as the one before the House. We on the left challenge that approach.

On a broader global scale, tragically, tens and perhaps hundreds of millions of people are hungry and living in poverty not because our globe could not produce enough to satisfy the genuine needs of everybody but because of the way production and distribution are organised by global capitalism. That is the issue and therefore I do not accept the argument being made in this instance.

The other issue to which the Minister referred also concerns a lesser number of workers having to create the wealth, taxes etc., for an increasing number of pensioners. That relates to the argument made earlier. Lesser numbers of workers with technique, technology and know-how could create far more wealth if the structures were changed.

I remember, as might the Minister because we are about the same age, that in the 1960s and the early 1970s there were regular features and articles in the media that the big question facing workers in future decades was what to do with all the leisure time they will have because of the increase in the use of technology and technique just coming in at that time. It was a good point to discuss at the time but the reality is that workers are under more pressure than ever because technology and so on have been manipulated to ensure a maldistribution of the extra wealth created and a prevention of the amount of wealth that could be created if it was released and used for the benefit of society rather than for the private profit diktats of the current system.

The Minister's argument, with regard to this country in particular, about the demographic factors forcing this measure upon the Government does not hold. The number of births and the birth rate has gone up considerably in the past 20 years or more. For example, in 1990, according to the Central Statistics Office, there were 53,000 births here. In 2007 that figure had increased by 18,000 to 71,000. People did live longer but only 3,000 people lived longer in 2007; there were 3,000 fewer deaths. In 1991, there were 52,700 births and by 2008 that figure had increased to 75,000, an increase of more than 23,000. Similarly, I could compare 1992 with the last year for I have figures, which is 2009 when there were nearly 75,000 births. There has been a substantial increase, therefore.

Tragically, a number of those have been forced out of this country because of the disastrous crisis. There is also the factor that the youth who should and could be creating the wealth to sustain pensioners in a reasonable standard of living have no future here. In view of these factors the argument for this country made by the Minister does stand up to scrutiny. The reality is that our pensioners, like our youth and workers, are being sacrificed to the diktats of the European financial markets, the EU, the IMF and the European Central Bank. The interests of the private bankers and speculators of Europe will be protected and their profits may not be encroached upon at the expense of our people, including those people arriving at an age in their lives when they should be able to make a decision that they want to finish their working life of paid employment and go on to a period of leisure. They are being denied that at the behest of this Government, carrying on the reactionary policies of Fianna Fáil and the Green Party before them, at the diktats of the European financial markets. That is the reality. The Minister is putting the interests of the sharks and vampire banks in the European financial markets before the interests of our people, and sacrificing the interests of our people and the welfare of those of advancing years to protect these financial interests. That is shameful and it is reactionary.

Let us take the tens of billions of euro that will be committed to paying off the gambling debts of the European speculators and contrast that with the amounts necessary to sustain our pensions at 65, or even to reduce that age. We can see that the Government has shamefully decided to defend these massive financial gamblers at the expense of our people who are growing old. The Minister has not addressed the human dimension of this. I hope that by 2021 or 2028 we will have been able to change society substantially from the diseased system that we have at the moment, to a system where we can unlock the wealth and the means of creating wealth, and allow those in a position to create wealth to work instead of being in enforced idleness. Therefore, I hope that these reactionary measures will be reversed, assuming they are passed.

What about the human dimension to this? Think about the idea of keeping a man on construction sites until he is 68 years of age. Anyone who worked on construction sites - even some of the Deputies who came from more privileged backgrounds did so in their student days - knows how tough and wearing it is. The idea that a man should have to do this every day in the rigours of winter is quite shameful. Women in our constituency and in other constituencies have to tear themselves from their beds at four or five o'clock in the morning to go into factories or offices and clean them. They might be looking forward to going onto a State pension, but they are now condemned to do it until they are 68. That is quite shameful. Even as a statement of humanity, this Government should have said "No" to this particular measure from the bureaucrats in the EU and the IMF. It is reactionary and shameful from every point of view and I am absolutely opposed to it.

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