Jonathan O'Brien (Cork North Central, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Deputy Danny Healy-Rae raised an important issue. Individuals will decide to retire for various reasons. As Deputy John Brady stated, some may decide to retire on health grounds. Others may have a nice pension that they feel comfortable they can retire on and they might want to spend time with grandchildren or become their childminders.

Then again, there may be other people in those circumstances who do not have family or grandchildren. Their only social interaction might be through work. The mental health side of it is important because if somebody who does not have strong family support at that age is forced to retire, it can affect that person's mental health.

It is important that the objective is not to force people to retire. One of the arguments that was raised on Second Stage was whether it would be possible to stop somebody who was not capable of doing his or her job from carrying on forever. If people are not capable of doing their job it does not matter whether they are 66, 76, 36 or 46. If that person is not capable of doing the job, there are mechanisms to deal with that.

The age argument is also somewhat of a red herring. In the public sector very few people of that age would have jobs involving a lot of manual labour. There would be a very small number of cases where somebody might be physically unable to do a job. It is a flawed argument to say that somebody would not have the mental capacity at 66, 65 or 67 to continue doing a job that the person was doing excellently 12 months previously. Age does not come into a person's ability to do a job. Obviously certain types of jobs would be an exception, but age certainly does not come into the argument regarding a person's ability to work or not.