Bríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

That is not the case. Let us suppose a person has worked from 1984 to 2015 and that person made a home and left a job in 1969 or 1970 to rear children. Finally, let us suppose the person went back to the workforce and worked for 32 or 33 years until 2015. That person would have paid more than a sufficient number of contributions to get a full pension. However, the figure is not calculated based on the past 33 or 34 years of full employment. In the cases of the people I have met, wages were decent and so their contributions would have been decent. However, when it came to measuring what they were entitled to, the reckoning went right back to 1969 and produced an average figure. That put these people on a lower grade of pension, at €209 instead of €230 per week. There are thousands of people in that predicament, and they are mostly women.