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

I move amendment No. 34:

In page 12, between lines 2 and 3, to insert the following:“23. Three months from the passing of this Act, the Minister shall lay a report before the Dáil on the matter of extending the Homemaker Scheme contribution years that can be disregarded for the purposes of determining the yearly average of claimants who raised families in the years prior to April 1994.".

I want to add to everything that was said earlier. This is a grey area because it affects those like me who have lots of grey hair, not to put too fine a pun on it. It should be re-examined. As the Minister said himself, we may need to look at mechanisms to balance this out. I emphasise that at no point do I or any other Deputy intend, by putting down amendments, to come out with a scheme that penalises one group of workers over another or that the load of this should be passed to another group of pension recipients. In other words, extra money will have to be forked out but that is not extra money the State had not received in contributions from these people. This is provably a cohort of people who went back to work in the mid-1980s, worked until now and paid a lot of pension contributions but who are now being penalised because of the time they left. It is worth reminding ourselves that a lot of people in their 60s and 70s left school quite young and started working at age 14 or 15. It would be unusual to do that nowadays but in those days it was normal to go into a factory or shop work having left school early due to the absence of free secondary education. There were a lot of social and economic reasons for it but they are being severely penalised and that is wrong. If it does not get sorted out at departmental level, it will go elsewhere and probably end up being more of a rigmarole and expense to the State. As the amendment will not be accepted, I ask that a report be laid out very soon.