Mr. Seán Quigley:

It is impossible for me to put myself in their position but the reality is that in most of these cases the money will run out. There is possibly an attempt to look at any and every situation where there may have been a drop in the fund's value or something went wrong. The reality is that looking at the performance of the fund over an appropriate period, as the graph shows, there was a dip in 2008 but looking at it over the period for which the fund was designed, it has extended the value of those funds, accepting that those funds were never going to be adequate in the first place. It is a natural concern for the committee and the families to have, that their moneys will run out but it is quite a complex area. As the Deputy said, if he was managing other people's money, he would take a low risk approach. Most of our money is in low risk investments but they generate low returns. Whenever we look at these cases, and there is a relatively small number of them, it would have been remiss of us to say that we would put it in a low risk investment knowing what the inevitable outcome would be, namely, that the moneys would run out much quicker. There is a balancing act of taking an appropriate level of risk to sustain the value of the funds, within which there will be periods of volatility, but one must look at it over the longer term.