Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

It would be a very powerful argument to be able to say it is big, it got worse during the recession and it is not better for men and women in their 20s or 30s than men or women in their 50s and 60s. It would be very powerful to be able to see that.

I have started to read through the National Women's Council universal pension idea. It is expensive; it was costed at about €700 million. That is a chunk of change in anyone's book. There are an increasing number of people who have either retired or are close to retirement, particularly women as was pointed out earlier, who are finding they do not meet the contributory pension eligibility criteria and do not qualify for the non-contributory pension because they are a so-called dependent.

I have looked in the last few weeks into the minutiae of the detail and it turns out that if one works for ten years, one gets the full pension. If people were unfortunate enough to work for three weeks after their leaving certificate back in the 1970s or if they work for 25 years, they could find themselves with less. Typically what is happening is worse than that. As men worked and got the stamps, it is nearly always women who were unfortunate enough to be signed up to a month's work or a year's work and then there is a big gap. As the witnesses pointed out, it has not gone back far enough in terms of the home-makers and so on. How big a problem is the National Women's Council finding this is? The witnesses have clearly done a lot of thinking around the State pension. Deputies have a very strange view of the world. They are a bit like doctors, who might think that everyone in Ireland is sick because they only ever meet sick people.

Deputies only tend to meet people who are in trouble, so they do not have a very good sense of what is actually going on. I guess both groups here would have a view on this. How big an issue is it for men and women? It seems to be mainly for women nearing retirement who are finding out that they have been absolutely destroyed because they worked for one or two years in their early 20s.