Mr. Fergus Whelan:

When I took up my current post 15 years ago, every defined-benefit scheme in the country was in a huge surplus. At that time, the State told us those surpluses had to be reduced. Schemes reacted to that one way or another. They either took contribution holidays or they increased benefits. There was a small handful of scheme closures which involved structural issues in industry not the defined-benefit nature of the schemes. The print industry scheme went because the print industry ceased to be an industry with the invention of computers.
I agree that Ireland performed worse in pensions terms than any other OECD country. That is because we were hugely overexposed to equities, much more than any other country. The regulatory system should have pointed that out. Of our assets, 66% were exposed to equities. The next highest country was the home of ubercapitalism, the United States of America, where the statistic was 44%. In the UK, 25% of funds were exposed to equities. When the regulatory system should have been pointing that out and regulating it, it decided instead to regulate trustee behaviour. That is what it is still doing. Trustee behaviour has nothing to do with the collapse in pensions. The collapse of our pensions system is a failure of the regulatory system. We must recognise that. We must get confidence back into the system, which we will not do by pretending defined-benefit schemes were always going to fold anyway. That is not so.
It is very late in the day for anything to be done. What needed to be done and what could have been done was a softening of the funding standard to buy time. The horse has now bolted to some extent. Workers have lost their money and confidence is gone. We had better start to rebuild confidence. The only way to do that is to examine the regulatory system and admit where we got it wrong.