Willie O'Dea (Limerick City, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The problems facing the pension system in this country are manyfold. Unfortunately I will only have time in the two minutes available to me to focus on one of these problems. I suspect the reason the Minister for Social Protection is not here is that less than one month ago we told her in unmistakable terms that the 30 June deadline for the trustees of defined benefit pension schemes to submit funding proposals would not be met by most of those trustees. That has turned out to be the case. They have not submitted their proposals by the 30 June deadline because they know they have no hope of meeting the onerous funding requirements set out for them. The result is that many of them will wind up in a situation where the assets are distributed in a most unfair and patently unjust manner. When these schemes wind up, those who have already retired will get the full benefits to which they are entitled regardless of how much it will cost - it is costing a lot more now than previously - and the balance will have to be distributed among the remaining scheme members. A person who has retired, such as a chief executive with an index-linked pension of €100,000 per annum, will have his or her pension fully protected, whereas somebody who has worked for 30 years and is a few weeks or months short of retirement may get nothing.

This is not simply an academic exercise. I am currently dealing with three deferred pensioners with the TSB in Limerick, all of whom are in their late 50s. They should be entitled to pensions ranging between €22,000 and €25,000 per annum but, as a result of the wind-up of their scheme and the fact that those who are already retired have to be fully compensated, they have been told they will get amounts ranging between €4,000 and €5,000 per annum. That is a blatant injustice.

The Minister promised on a number of occasions to change the order of priority. She has allowed the 30 June deadline to elapse in full knowledge that the schemes will wind up and their assets will be distributed in this unfair manner. She made commitments in the programme for Government and the legislative programme, as well as to organisations such as ICTU and IBEC, but her indecision appears to be final. What is the reason for this paralysis? Is she going to do something, even at this late stage, to alleviate the problem these people face?

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