Seán Sherlock (Cork East, Labour)
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112. To ask the Minister for Employment Affairs and Social Protection if she will publish the Budget 2024 input document for the State pension process in October, given that Ireland is the only Eurozone country that does not index its State pension to earnings or inflation; and the current status of benchmarking the rate of the State pension against 34% of average earnings. [46389/23]

Heather Humphreys (Cavan-Monaghan, Fine Gael)
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Last September I announced a series of reforms to the State Pension system in response to the recommendations from the Commission on Pensions. As part of this, the Government committed that a smoothed earnings method to calculating a benchmarked/indexed rate of State Pension payments will be introduced as an input to the annual budget process and be submitted to Government each year.

My Department completed the benchmarking calculation and submitted this to Government as an input to the Budget 2024 process. This input was considered as part of the overall Budgetary discussions in the context of wider economic and environmental factors, Budget expenditure pressures across Departments, and taking into account once-off cost of living supports.