Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

If we were to have a working family payment that genuinely reduced child poverty and incentivised work over welfare there would have to be no losers and that would be expensive, but not prohibitive. That is the type of initiative we will be seeking to come up with in the early part of next year.

As I said, long-term employment is down to 4.4%. The target is to reduce that figure to below 2.5%, which would be an acceptable level. There are a lot of things happening in this space, including JobPath and initiatives to make sure work pays. Somebody made the valid point earlier that having a job is no guarantee of being out of poverty, which is true because we do have a working poor in Ireland. Part of the solution will have to be increases in the minimum wage and rising pay levels in a sustainable way over the coming years. I do not think anyone would disagree with that.

On pension equality and pension reform, as I said earlier, this is an issue to which we should probably dedicate a full session of the committee. We are moving towards - this was decided some time ago - a total contribution approach to calculating the contributory pension. Currently, a person is required to have made 520 contributions over ten years. There are very few pensions that would provide a full pension after ten years' contributions. This certainly is not the case in respect of a public sector pension. The current system also provides for an averaging of the number of weeks a person worked during the course of his or her life, which creates all sorts of anomalies and injustices, as such things always do. I am sure all members have come across people who worked for 17 years, but spread over 40 years, and were not entitled to a full pension while somebody who worked the right 11 years received a full pension. It is really messy. Once again, any changes made in this area, unless one has hundreds of millions of euro to invest, will result in winners and losers.

Any member who wishes to make a proposal in this regard should run it by us, because we hope to be to able tell them how many losers there will be, as well as how many winners, from the changes that are proposed. It will take some time but we will eventually move to a total contributions approach, whereby the number of contributions a person makes over the period of his or her working life is what matters, not when they made them. There will have to be a generous recognition of all forms of caring - not only looking after kids. We have a lot of work to do on this yet, and at the moment we are going through individual pension records and PRSI records to see what the implications will be for real individuals. More work will be done early next year, but it will be tricky, and I would be cautious about rushing into any changes without fully understanding the impact they might have.

As things stand, every time the live register drops by 1,000 it saves us €9.2 million in a full year.