Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

No, we asked the OECD to carry out a study of the pensions landscape in Ireland. We are on the fifth anniversary of the infamous bank guarantee that cost us all so much. Shortly after that the pension funding standard was suspended, partly because of the chaos on the equity markets and partly because bond prices for buying annuities became difficult from an Irish point of view. As I have mentioned, we also had green papers and position papers all done in the heat in the Celtic tiger years when the promises that could be made to people were much more significant. Then the financial world as we knew it crashed. That was the situation I inherited when I became the Minister for Social Protection. I asked the OECD to look at where we are now and, bearing in mind the position that we are in, what we can best do to provide the vast majority of people with a decent standard of income in retirement and whether there is a mechanism to have a second supplementary universal pension scheme that would allow people to perhaps double the minimum level of retirement pension. The OECD published its study on that. The World Bank looked at governance in a related study. The report is factual. It said that, relatively speaking, the pension position on contributory and non-contributory pensions meant that pensioners had a good state pension base but it recommended that people should save for an additional pension. The level of pension covered by private schemes is rather small - it is only around 50%. The problem is that atypical workers, young workers and women are often not making additional private pension provision. An auto-enrolment or mandatory scheme would provide for some of that.