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

I was coming to that. I was also coming to the issue around most of them being women. Deputy Smith is referring to a system we call averaging. Under averaging, it is not the number of contributions a person has made during the course of her working life that counts, but when she has made them. That is a negative for people who have a gap in employment. This is often, but not always, for caring and it usually, but not always, involves women. If a woman works for some years, leaves employment for any reason and goes back to work again, she loses out because the calculation is averaged over a long period, including the gap in the middle. The people who benefit from that system are those who are here and who perhaps never worked for a long time or who started work for the first time later in life. Even though these people have paid fewer contributions overall, they get the full pension. That is unfair. We can equalise that, but by equalising it, this group is going to lose out. This means there may be one group of tens of thousands of people who benefit, but we will also have tens of thousands of people who lose.

The way we intend to go - it is in the pensions framework already and we have committed to doing it by 2020 - is to move towards a total contributions approach. This will get rid of averaging altogether. This would amount to moving to a point whereby the total number of contributions a person makes is what counts. However, that figure would have to be set at a higher level of contributions than a person currently has to make for things to work out. It is not what it may seem, and there will be significant winners and losers. At the moment we are trying to go through all the pension records and look at all the different types of cases and scenarios that might arise to get some clue of what the total number of winners and losers might be in each scenario. I hope my officials will come to me at some point with an options paper. I will share it with the committee members when I have it. Every time we change the rules, there are winners and losers unless we are willing to drop hundreds of millions of euro to ensure there are no losers. Before I make any decision or ask the committee to agree to any decision I want to have before me the options and the numbers of winners and losers in each case, as well as the cost.

Deputy Smith is absolutely right to say that when it comes to this particular aspect of State contributory pensions, most of the people who have a gap in their employment are women. Therefore, when we meet these groups, they are mostly female. That is true. However, committee members should bear some points in mind when considering the Social Insurance Fund overall. Women gain more from it. They live longer and get paid their pensions for longer. They gain far more from the maternity benefit system, for example, than men do from the paternity benefit system, and they pay less in for fewer years. This is not my opinion. An actuarial review was undertaken of the fund and it showed that women benefit more from the social insurance system than men. Therefore, if we are going to go down a gender equalisation route, it would require a shift in benefits from women to men.